Bibliography of Fire Effects on Cultural Resources

This bibliography is a by-product of a joint effort between the National Park Service and the USFS Fire Sciences Lab to produce a review of knowledge on fire effects on cultural resources. The main product of the project will be a "Rainbow Series" volume on fire effects on cultural resources and archeology (Jones and Ryan, in preparation). The bibliography does include some references on the historical and traditional uses of fire and on the history of fire. However as an aid to authors of the Rainbow volume, its primary focus is on the direct and indirect effects of heating on various types of cultural resources. Kevin Ryan of the Fire Sciences Lab and Trinkle Jones of Western Archeological and Conservation Center (WACC) deserve credit for making this project possible. Both have been of immeasurable assistance to me throughout my work on this project. Most literature concerning fire effects on cultural resources is unpublished "gray literature." Many of the references cited in this bibliography are fairly obscure. Over the course of about 13 months, I was able to obtain a great deal of the literature cited here. This material is now on file at the Western Archeological and Conservation Center in Tucson. It will be made available by appointment. The process of collecting this material required the assistance of many people. I called numerous USFS ranger districts and BLM offices, e-mailed several authors and solicited the input of several "pyro-archeologists." Numerous people responded to my e-mails and phone calls; several folks were willing to send me reports and manuscripts to put on file at WACC. Everybody who helped me in this effort deserves a lot of thanks. Archeologist Trinkle Jones, librarian Johanna Alexander, and I began our searches for fire effects literature with Faith Duncan's annotated bibliography (Duncan 1990). She created a comprehensive list of references on fire effects on cultural resources, which was a tremendous help to our project. Additional references were found by reviewing other bibliographies and reference lists or were submitted by people interested in the subject. Citations were checked for accuracy by obtaining hard copies in-house or at the library or by confirming that a reference was cited the same way by at least two authors. Some of Duncan's references, especially letters, could not be relocated so are not included in this bibliography. To date, the bibliography is available in ProCite and MS-Word formats, and we plan to make it available on the Internet. I hope that this work will be helpful to all those people trying to bring together the worlds of fire, archeology and resource management.Provenance: Contributed to Sipnuuk Food Security Collection by Arielle Halpern, doctoral student in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, in association with research for her dissertation-in-progress: Effects of Prescribed Fire on Tanoak Associated Plant Assemblages and Karuk Cultural Use Species.