Lifting the veil: pyrogeographic manipulation and the leveraging of environmental change by people across the Vale of Belvoir, Tasmania, Australia

Abstract

Humans undertake land management and care of landscapes to maintain safe, healthy, productive and predictable environments. Often, this is achieved through creating spatial and temporal heterogeneity in a way that leverages the natural world; both amplifying natural trends and, in some cases, driving shifts counter to natural processes. However, a persistent paradigm governing the understanding of proxy evidence of past human activity on the environment is that human agency is only recognized in proxy data when trends oppose what are expected to occur naturally. Framing research in such a way ignores the fact that people have, continue to, and will always leverage the environment in ways tha..