TGI Friday Seminar: Fire, Climate, and Society in the Ancient Southwestern US | Department of Geography and the Environment
August 31, 2015

TGI Friday Seminar: Fire, Climate, and Society in the Ancient Southwestern US

TGI Friday Seminar: Fire, Climate, and Society in the Ancient Southwestern US

Who: Dr. Christopher Roos, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University

When: Friday, September 4th, 3-4 PM

Where: EESAT 130

Why? In the Southwest US, a century of fire suppression has turned old growth forests into tinderboxes that burn in increasingly destructive ways as the climate warms. But do all fire-climate-society relationships conform to this story? Southwestern pine forests have been home to American Indian communities for millennia. How did these communities cope with - and impact - these flammable forests through variable climates? What lessons might we learn from these experiences?

Dr. Christopher Roos brings archaeological, dendrochronological, and paleoecological information together to weave a story of human and climatic impacts on Arizona's fire-prone forests over the last millennium to illuminate pathways towards stainable fire-climate-society relationships.

http://faculty.smu.edu/croos/