Erana Loveless

Program: Anthropology, Ph.D.

Advisors: Don Falk, Ron Towner, Steve Kuhn, Nieves Zedeño

Area of Study: The Northern Rocky Mountains (Canada and Montana), Northern Australia

Dissertation Topic:  With the sweeping decimation of bison and native American populations in the 1800s, did fire regimes change at the forest-grassland boundaries?  I am investigating how small-scale landscape patches once produced by bison and indigenous burning may have given way to a more homogenous landscape more prone to large-scale, high-intensity fires.
 
Other Interests: remote sensing, hunter-gatherers, fire use and management, trophic cascades, pyric herbivory, pyrodendrochronology, problems of time and perspective in ecological anthropology, shifting baselines, and other human-animal-fire relationships.

Keywords:  Historical ecology, fire ecology, dendrochronology, fire scars, hunter-gatherers, problems of time and perspective in ecological anthropology, shifting baselines, coupled socio-ecological systems, human-animal relationships, secondary adaptations (reactive foraging), paleoclimatology. Bridging archaeology with the ethnographic and ecological present; applied anthropology.