Pyne, S.J. and Goldammer, J.G. (1997) ‘The Culture of Fire: An Introduction to Anthropogenic Fire History’, in Clark, J.S., Cachier, H., Goldammer, J.G. and Stocks, B. (eds.) Sediment Records of Biomass Burning and Global Change. Berlin: Springer.

Pyne and Goldammer treat anthropogenic fire as one of the decisive mechanisms through which humans have altered the Earth. Their iconic proposition is that the capture and management of fire precede both industrialisation and agriculture as a planetary transformation, making combustion a mediator between biological evolution, cultural practice and environmental history. Fire is presented simultaneously as ecological process, technology, cultural symbol and historical archive. The theoretical contribution lies in refusing the separation of natural and human fire regimes: landscapes record shifting mixtures of lightning, deliberate burning, land management and fossil-fuel combustion. Methodologically, the chapter demands an interdisciplinary fire history assembled from sediments, charcoal, tree rings, archaeology, ethnography, documents and ecological reasoning. This evidential heterogeneity is itself central to the argument, because no single record can reconstruct fire’s trajectory. The work bridges environmental history, ecology, archaeology and energy studies, providing a deep temporal genealogy for contemporary debates on combustion, land management and planetary agency.