Tree rings reveal persistent Western Apache (Ndee) fire stewardship and niche construction in the American Southwest

Identifying the influence of low-density Indigenous populations in paleofire records has been methodologically challenging. In the Southwest United States, well-replicated fire histories suggest that abundant lightning and suitable climate conditions drove frequent low-severity wildfires in dry pine forests independent of human activities even as ethnography provided hints that highly mobile indigenous populations used fire in myriad land use contexts. Here, we leverage published and unpublished tree-ring fire history records from pine forests in Western Apache (Ndee) traditional territory in central and eastern Arizona (N = 34 sites, N = 649 trees) to demonstrate that historical fire regimes were overwhelmingly influenced by Ndee cultural burning. Our tree-ring synthesis shows significantly more frequent fires in Ndee territory than elsewhere in the region for centuries before the establishment of reservations (1600–1870 CE). Despite the heightened fire activity, fires were largely small and asynchronous, occurred disproportionately in late April and May, when Ndee invested significant subsistence activities in these pine forests, and occurred independent of climate drivers. This suggests that Ndee fire stewardship created a patchwork of nearly annual small, spring fires that inhibited natural fire spread and limited the influence of drought on fire activity. Our work shows that even relatively small, highly mobile populations of forager-gardeners had significant influence on some pre-Euroamerican fire regimes despite abundant natural ignitions. Our study shows clearly that Indigenous fire management impacted fire-size distributions, fire frequencies, and fire seasonality in ways that cannot be explained by seasonal and annual lightning densities.