Stratigraphic evidence for culturally variable Indigenous fire regimes in ponderosa pine forests of the Mogollon Rim area, east-central Arizona

The impact of Indigenous populations on historical fire regimes has been controversial and beset by mismatches in the geographic scale of paleofire reconstructions and the scale of land-use behaviors. It is often assumed that anthropogenic burning is linearly related to population density and not different cultural practices. Here we take an off-site geoarchaeology strategy to reconstruct variability in historical fire regimes (