Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
It is difficult today to comprehend how pervasively fire could affect this
process, but as an interesting illustration consider the ways by which
pyrotechnology shaped the economy of food for sixteenth-century Amer-
ican Indians as recorded in Thomas Harriot's
Briefe and True Report of the
New Found Land of Virginia.
In paraphrase: The axis of the village passes
through a great fire, around which the tribe stages its “solemn feasts.” The
hunting grounds for deer they keep open by regular burning, and the deer
themselves may also be fire-driven into streams or coastal tidewaters during
a fall hunt.The crops of maize are swiddened.The houses have hearth fires.
But, unexpectedly, the cycle extends even to fishing. With fire the Indians
felled trees and hollowed them into boats. They carried fire in the craft
while they speared for their prey and at night the torch would draw fish
toward them. They broiled their catch over flames, or cooked it in an
earthen pot along with maize and other foodstuffs.They could dry and pre-
serve any surplus fish, also with fire and its trapped smoke. After the meal
they could celebrate or offer prayers around a “great fyer.” Like their vil-
lage, their lives and their economy centered around fire.
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COOKING WOODS
If fish, venison, maize, and cassava could be cooked, why could fire not
“cook” the landscape for other goods? Or, indeed, the land itself ? Ancient
chemistry was largely cooking applied to assorted substances. Whether the
change sought was physical (a change of state) or chemical (a change of
substance), fire wrought it. Fire could break apart, distill, soften, stiffen,
encrust, melt, or transmute a landscape.
Outside of Nile-like flood plains, where water could do the work, agri-
culture looked to fire to purge a site of bad features and promote good
ones.A good burn did what fire ceremonies claimed it could do: it cleansed
a site of weeds, pathogens, and competing species, and it fertilized with
combustion-freed nutrients even as it opened a site to the sun. A good fire,
however, required good fuel. Farmers could get it by plunging into new
lands or by growing it; the agronomic term for such fuel is “fallow.”
Thus fields, whether farmed or grazed, moved. Either the field cycled
through the land, or the landscape (as a succession of plants) cycled through
a given plot. The first is classic swidden, or slash-and-burn cultivation; the
second, field rotation. But both relied on fire.The cycle of fallowing obeyed
the logic of fire ecology. Returns were excellent the first year, less each
