ABSTRACT
Studies of past human response to climate change usually focus on how people dealt with the transformation of the ecosystems they relied on for food, taking it as a given that ecological change was the inevitable result of climate change. Paleoecological evidence in eastern North America suggests a more radical societal response: the preservation of prairies and pyrophytic (fire-loving) forests on a regional scale through ecological management that mimicked past climate conditions. Acting in defiance of climate change, Indigenous people held back the succession of forests in the “prairie peninsula” east of the Mississippi river and prevented the “mesophication” of eastern forests for thousands of years, from the end of the mid-Holocene Warm Period c. 5,000 years ago until Euro-American colonization. Both the eastern prairies and nut-producing forests were domesticated landscapes, created through the skillful use of fire to support plants and animals that were necessary for the continuation of Indigenous lifeways. These ecological manipulations represent landscape domestication on a grand scale and open our minds to the possibility that a society can live through climate change without traumatically disentangling itself from the sustaining ecosystems.
