An 11,000 year fire history of a coastal temperate rainforest in Prince Rupert Harbour, British Columbia ...

• Main Author: Duelks, Jonathan William
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2021
• Subjects: Tsimshian; Tsimshian*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0396968; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0396968

This thesis utilizes high resolution charcoal analysis and charcoal morphology to reconstruct fire history for Prince Rupert Harbour (PRH), British Columbia between ~13,200 and 3500 cal BP. Home to the North Coast Tsimshian, PRH is an ideal study location for evaluating demographic and related environmental patterns for its extensive and well-studied archaeological record yet it lacks local paleoenvironmental data. I use this fire history to: produce one line of localized palaeoecological data, assess variation in charcoal accumulation rates (CHAR) compared against regional and semi-local paleoclimate records, determine whether or not the presence of an anthropogenic signal exists in the charcoal record, and test the relationship between natural charcoal accumulation rates and demographic models for the PRH region between 6000 and 3500 cal BP. Results indicate that fire frequency and intensity were low with just fourteen potential fire events in the DIL CHAR record, 9 in Zone 2 (13,200-6000 cal BP) and 4 in ...