Burning as a Throughline: A History of Anthropogenic Fires in the National Forests of North Carolina

ABSTRACT Anthropogenic fires constitute a throughline in the fire history of Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests of Western North Carolina; they have been used for different reasons by Indigenous and Settler communities, scientists and managers. Evidence from 8,000+ years of human presence in the region challenges hegemonic narratives in which a uniform, universal era of fire exclusion occurred. Prescribed burning has been promoted as one of the best practices for restoring safer fire regimes and healthier ecosystems. Fire managers have been working towards increasing prescribed burning operations within their jurisdictions. Rather than centring a clear suppression versus burning dichotomy or simplifying variability, this article enlists the concept of ‘culture’ to smooth out the transitions between times when human fires were absent and present, and connects twenty-first-century institutionalised fire management activities to previous people’s practices. Intentional burning has strong causal effects in contemporary managers’ and scientists’ paradigms, leading them to integrate fire into multipronged strategies for managing the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests.