Citations:pyroculture

Noun: "(ecology, anthropology) the use of controlled burning, chiefly by hunter-gatherers, as a form of ecological engineering [...]"

 * 1999, Michael G. Barbour, Jack H. Burk, Wanna D. Pitts, Frank S. Gilliam, & Mark W. Schwartz, Terrestrial Plant Ecology, page 443:
 * Native American woman were ethnobotanists; their role in the economy of their culture cannot be overstated. In western North America, fire was used by Native American woman as a principal form of care and culture to increase the density, abundance, and diversity of desirable plant species and to reduce the competition from other plants. They tested and tended native plants for basketry materials, but also for food, medicine, dyes, and even games.
 * The use of fire to increase the supply of harvestable bulbs, fruits and seeds, and even rhizomes and leaves along with stimulating epicormic branching for basketry supplies was common practice. Ecological effects of that pyroculture also included the recycling of nutrients and the reduction of detritus, thus maintaining desirable habitat and decreasing the possibility of undesirable wildfire (Anderson 1998).
 * 1999, "Introduction", in Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest, (ed. Robert Boyd), page 11:
 * The particulars of the cultural management of all these species are largely unknown and must be surmised given the termination of aboriginal burning in the 1850s. But the ubiquity of fire in the subsistence quest and environment has lead one researcher to term the indigenous valley life-style a "pyroculture." The Willamette Valley was the most intensively fire-managed environment in the aboriginal Northwest.
 * 1999, Ecosystems Northwest, Marys River Preliminary Watershed Assessment, page 12:
 * The use of fire for vegetation management has been termed "pyroculture" (Gilsen 1989).
 * 2002, Lisa Hemesath, Tina Nunez, Bob Roth, Crystal Burgoyne, & Cameron La Follette, Pringle, Glenn-Gibson, Claggett and Mill Creeks Watershed Assessment, page 3-11:
 * About 3,500-3,000 years ago, the Kalapuya began to practice “pyroculture” -- systematically burning portions of the Willamette Valley. This reduced the climax forest into an open grassland/forest mosaic where fire-resistant oaks dominated and camas and tarweed moved into the grasslands. Burning removed competing plants and encouraged the re-growth of tarweed, camas and filberts.
 * 2011, John Paull, "Environmental Management in Tasmania: Better Off Dead?", Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region (eds. Daniel Niles & Godfrey Baldacchino), page 155:
 * Montanus (1671:22) however commented that: “Greenery would abound more if the natives did not burn the areas where they wander”, without at all appreciating the pyroculture that had been practiced by the Tasmanians for millennia as an innovative and successful environmental management strategy (Bird et al. 2008).
 * 2014, Alison Stenger & Reid Bryson, "Archaeoclimatology and Prehistory of the Woodburn-Salem Region of Oregon, USA", page 6:
 * Another change that is documented archaeologically is the development in some areas of a pyro-culture, which defines the intentional use of fire to modify the environment (Gilsen, 2003; Connolly 2003).
 * 2015, Shannon Tushingham & Jelmar W. Eerkens, "Hunter-Gatherer Tabacco Smoking in Ancient North America: Current Chemical Evidence and a Framework for Future Studies", in Perspectives on the Archaeology of Pipes, Tobacco and Other Smoke Plants in the Ancient Americas (eds. Elizabeth Anne Bollwerk & Shannon Tushingham, page 216:
 * Despite the absence of farmed crops (i.e., maize, beans, and squash) and agriculture, it is clear that the western North American landscape was highly managed through fire maintenance (or pyroculture) for thousands of years (e.g., articles in Blackburn and Anderson 1993).
 * 2020, Jeremy Walker, More Heat Then Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy and Economics, page 60:
 * In the words of a recent scientific review of the effects accomplished by the ‘ecological engineering’ of traditional fire practitioners, ‘pyrodiversity begets biodiversity’. This a conscious cultural economy of fire in stark contrast to the organised irresponsibility of industrial pyroculture toward the ecological consequences of its burnings, of enclosed fires hidden behind ignition switches and powerpoints.
 * 2021, Hollie A. Kulago, Wayne Wapeemukwa, Paul J. Guernsey, & Matthew Black, "Land, Water, Mathematics, and Relationships: What Does Creating Decolonizing and Indigenous Curricula Ask of Us?", A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, Volume 57, Issue 3 (2021), page 350:
 * Furthermore, traditional pyroculture (seasonal burning) and other land management strategies have been systematically criminalized and suppressed, creating conditions ripe for catastrophic fire.

Noun: "(anthropology) the culture and technology developed through the domestication of fire by early humans"

 * 2005, Frank Niele, Energy: Engine of Evolution, page 94:
 * The driving force of pyroculture was a flow of light-giving heat from burning firewood; thus converted solar energy. But for the first time in the history of life, the prime shaping force of an energy-dissipating structure sprang from human ingenuity. Fire masters created technological artefacts such as the torch and the fireplace to conduct their new energy economy, which soon established ecological dominancy. Pyroculture happened to be a very successful evolutionary strategy.
 * 2007, Dragos Gheorghiu & George Nash, "Introduction: Firemaker!", in The Archaeology of Fire: Understanding Fire as Material Culture (eds. Dragos Gheorghiu & George Nash), page 14:
 * Most recently, at the meeting of the Palaeontology Society, Brian Ludwig's study of the thermal alteration of the stone tools excavated from contemporary sites with Koobi Fora showed that the potlid fractures on the stone tools, post 1.6 myr, could be the index of the emergence of a pyro-culture at that time.
 * 2014, Jordan Anthony Burich, "Catching Fire: Toward a Cognitive-Processual Analysis of Cypriot Pyrotechnics and Sacred Imagery During the Bronze Age", thesis submitted to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, page 23:
 * Around 1.6 million years ago, the Homo erectus inhabitants there emerged as a “pyro-culture,” using high temperature fire to create stone and bone implements (Gheorghiou & Nash 2007:14; Karlin and Julien 1994:153).
 * 2016, Mike Leeder & Joy Lawlor, GeoBritannica: Geological Landscapes and the British Peoples, unnumbered page:
 * Whatever the nature of the initial discovery, specialized 'pit-smelters' and larger free-standing furnaces were gradually developed. Colonizing descendants of migrating Copper and Bronze Age peoples, especially seafaring merchants and traders, would have spread the lore of copper-sourcing as they went; their cultural packages included pyroculture as well as agriculture. These twin skills spread together with their owners across the landscapes of Neolithic southern Europe over almost four millennia.

Noun: "(agriculture) slash and burn"

 * 1991, Sam L. J. Page & Helán E. Page, "Western Hegemony over African Agriculture in Southern Rhodesia and its Continuing Threat to Food Security in Independent Zimbabwe", Agriculture and Human Values, Fall 1991, page 12:
 * Furthermore, as pointed out earlier, traditional pyro-culture did not include the total destruction or removal of trees. Undisturbed tree roots served to bind soil particles together and to prevent sheet erosion. Traditional African farmers recognized that it is easier to restore nutrients to exhausted soils than to "rebuild" a soil after it has "collapsed" in physical terms (Lal & Greenland, 1979).
 * 1999, Wybe Van Halsema, "Endogenous Development of Natural Resource Management in Communal Areas of Southern Zimbabwe: A Case Study Approach", dissertation submitted to the University of South Africa, page 117:
 * The colonization by the British initially was a relief to the Shona in that it enabled them to resume their original management practices for farming (pyro-culture) and natural resource use (slash and burn).
 * 2013, Collin Calvin Mabiza, "Integrated Water Resources Management, Institutions and Livelihoods Under Stress: Bottom-Up Perspectives from Zimbabwe", dissertation submitted to Delft University of Technology, page 99:
 * Success depended on technologies or innovations such as shifting cultivation and pyro-culture (slash and burn), both of which were characterised by minimum disturbance of the soil (Manyanga, 2006), which in contemporary language could be minimum or zero-tillage.
 * 2014, Giovanni Kezich, "The bear and the plough: Shamanism in the Neolithic", in ''Shamanhood and Art (ed. Elvira Eevr Djaltchinova-Malec), pages 104-105:
 * and stains of lampblack sap are liberally smeared of the face of the onlookers, as a form of rudimental communion to the good wishes, which is in itself the sign of the slash-and-burn pyro-culture that fostered in the incipient neolithic the domestication of cereals proper (Forni 2011).
 * 2021, Bryan Umaru Kauma, "A social, economic and environmental history of African small grains in Zimbabwe, from the pre-colonial past to the present", dissertation submitted to Stellenbosch University, page 160:
 * This equipped many African women with different ideas on mixed cropping, bush fallowing and pyro-culture, which spread their crops and improved agricultural yields, thus permitting them to collect more food seasonally.