I) Assessing the role of fire in pre-Columbian Amazonian landscapes

Wed, 06 May 2026 20:51:19 +0000

# Assessing the Role of Fire in Pre-Columbian Amazonian Landscapes For centuries, the Amazon rainforest has been celebrated as one of Earth’s last great wild frontiers—lush, biodiverse, and seemingly untouched by large-scale human influence. However, recent archaeological, paleoenvironmental, and ecological research reveals a dramatically different picture: pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples actively shaped Amazonian landscapes using fire as a key land management tool. Fire was not merely a destructive force but a sophisticated instrument in environmental stewardship, influencing forest composition, biodiversity, fire regimes, and human settlements across thousands of years. ## The Fire-Stick Legacy of Pre-Columbian Amazonia While wildfire events have long occurred naturally in tropical rainforests due to lightning strikes, evidence increasingly suggests that Indigenous communities intentionally applied fire to manage vegetation, enhance agricultural productivity, clear trails, promote useful plant growth, and reduce dangerous understory fuel loads. This practice, often referred to as “fire ecology management,” allowed early Amazonian societies to expand their settlements, cultivate fertile garden plots, and maintain open corridors within dense forests.