Some Important Inferences

Before we continue with Special Week, we pause to consider some inferences one could possibly draw from Dr. Thomas J. Connolly’s excellent paper, Anthropological and Archaeological Perspectives on Native Fire Management of the Willamette Valley, presented in the previous post.

First, the pre-Columbian Kalapuyan civilization may have been much more complex and sophisticated than previously assumed.

Recent studies of Kalapuyan linguistic diversity, together with oral histories, archaeological findings, and ethnobotanical advances indicate that the Willamette Valley had a polity of a dozen or more city states 500 years ago, and those city states had been developing in place for as much as 4,000 years. The Kalapuyans also possessed advanced agricultural techniques, processing centers for root, seed, fruit and fiber crops, central towns, road systems, a far-reaching trade system, territorial boundaries, land ownership systems, division of labor, burial mounds, and other indications of a much more populous and organized culture than early anthropologists gave them credit for.

This is not what is taught in our schools, lower or higher ed, today. Dr. Connolly’s paper reflects the most cutting-edge science, and our educational institutions are not current or up-to-date in this subject area.

Second, the Kalapuyans used fire to manipulate the vegetation in the Willamette Valley and in the surrounding hills and mountains. There is evidence that indicates this practice, on a landscape-scale, extends back at least 3,500 years. Regular, frequent, human-set fire had enormous effects upon the biota, as did human hunting.

Third, there is resistance in the Science Establishment to even consider anthropogenic fire and hunting. Dr. Connolly described it as “inertia”, but we think it is active repression of ideas that threaten the Old Paradigm. The resistance is cross-disciplinary, and includes anthropology, archaeology, and especially ecology.

Most ecologists today deny the enormous impact of Mankind upon Nature, for millennia, everywhere in the Western Hemisphere (and in all the other Hemispheres, too, for that matter). This denial has led to faulty science and a crisis of catastrophic fires that are destroying our forests, and erasing the ancient history that is written upon the land.

The denial is political, not scientific. There is no scientific debate on anthropogenic fire. There are no anthropogenic fire researchers at Oregon State, for instance, not in the College of Forestry, the USFS Forestry Sciences Lab, or in any of the other environmental departments or labs on campus. Debates and discussions about anthropogenic fire do not take place, and research papers that broach the possibility are suppressed.

Politics has trumped science in the institutions, but politics cannot trump the truth.

The real test of worth of Dr. Connolly’s paper is the number of citations it receives in future papers by other cutting-edge scientists challenging the Old Paradigm. We predict that the citations will be legion, someday.