Resilience and Recovery in the Dry Chaco: Ecological Knowledge Encoded in Forager Wildfire Narratives

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The tropical forests, shrublands, and savannas of the South American Dry Chaco are fire-prone ecosystems. Humans have occupied this region for thousands of years, raising the question of how they coped with this recurrent problem. On this point, Indigenous oral traditions are known to encode a broad range of local ecological knowledge and to be capable of preserving this knowledge for centuries. Although the traditions of the Chaco's earliest human occupants are unknown, the story corpora of recent Chaco hunter-gatherer populations have been well documented by anthropologists. Accordingly, we searched these corpora for catastrophic wildfire narratives, which we then coded for the presence of specific types of information relevant to coping with conflagration. We predicted that these stories would contain information about conditions that cause or increase the likelihood of conflagration, fire behavior and effects, human survival strategies, and plant and animal recovery. We parsed this information into 11 distinct content themes: Ambient Conditions, Cause, Direction/Speed, Duration/Frequency, Intensity, Severity, Spread, Coping Strategies, Cues, Animals, and Plants. Results indicate that wildfire stories occur cross-culturally in the Dry Chaco, and reliably encode useful information about past local fire regimes. In so doing, these narratives provide a heretofore untapped source of longitudinal fire ecology data, and attest to the importance of including Indigenous observations in global scientific inquiry.