However, there is

little question that native peoples utilized new techniques and strategies to interact with rapidly changing environments in colonial and post-colonial times. The colonization of the Californias is not unique in marking a fundamental historical transformation in human–environment relationships, when indigenous landscape management practices, often in operation for centuries or millennia, underwent extensive modifications as new colonial resource extraction programs were unleashed in local areas. Although colonists often initiated their own prescribed fires to enhance grasslands for livestock grazing and in the creation of agricultural fields, they had little compassion for traditional burning practices that destroyed their homes Wortmannin clinical trial and livestock

(e.g., PLX4032 clinical trial Hallam, 1979:35). Consequently, it was not uncommon for colonial administrators to prohibit native peoples from continuing to set fires in open lands in other regions of North America and Australia (Bowman, 1998:392; Boyd, 1999:108; Cronon, 1983:118–119; Deur, 2009:312–313). In North America, these prohibitions eventually became codified in rigorous fire cessation policies that were enacted by various government agencies on federal and state lands by the early twentieth century (Stephens and Sugihara, 2006). Future eco-archeological investigations are needed to evaluate the specific environmental effects of how modified indigenous resource management practices, in combination with colonial landscape strategies initiated by managerial, mission, Staurosporine supplier and settler colonists, influenced local ecosystems. The transition from indigenous to hybrid indigenous/colonial landscapes in California appears to have marked a major watershed in environmental transformations that continues to the present (Anderson, 2005, Preston, 1997 and Timbrook et al., 1993). There is little question that historical edicts that increasingly outlawed the burning of open lands in the late 1800s and

early 1900s had significant environmental implications in California as they reduced the diversity and spatial complexity of local habitats, changed the succession patterns of vegetation (often producing homogeneous stands of similar-aged trees and bushes), augmented the number of invasive species, and substantially increased fuel loads that can contribute to major conflagrations (Caprio and Swetnam, 1995, Keter, 1995 and Skinner and Taylor, 2006:212, 220; Skinner et al., 2006:178–179; van Wagtendonk and Fites-Kaufman, 2006:280). The Russian-American Company’s initial interest in California stemmed from its participation in the maritime fur trade involving the exchange of sea otter (Enhydra lutris) pelts (and other valuable furs) in China for Asian goods (teas, spices, silks, etc.), which were then shipped back to European and American markets for a tidy profit.