Fire has shaped the evolution of our species from the start. From presenting a danger to a valuable source of light and heat, fire and natural fire regimes presented a focal environmental factor for early hominins and homo sapiens. Reconstructing human interactions with and around fire is built on the investigation of heated materials or characteristic fire use features occurring in archaeological sites. In a first step this investigation requires the clear identification and differentiation of natural fires and post-depositional burning. Off-site fire use, including landscape burning and its impact on the environment by humans, is even more difficult to identify as this not associated
with archaeological remains, however, it can be investigated through other environmental archives such as sediment cores. The study of human fire use in the past, pyroarchaeology, employs both archaeological and geoscience methods to identify and characterize the material evidence of past fire events and relies on experimental and actualistic fire frameworks for behavioral inferences. This session aims to join researchers investigating paleo wildfires, past climate-human-fire-dynamics and related human interactions around fire and invites researchers that work in present fires and their effects on environment. From pyroarcheology to soil science, learning from past fires to understand better the current ones effects and vice versa.
Presentations involving the following topics are welcome:
• Prescribed and/or experimental fires;
• Human impact on fire regimes from sedimentary cores
• Fire history studies of archaeological periods
• Landscape burning practices
• Human fire use
• Methodological advances in fire research