In response to Joshua Piker's (this issue) comment on our article (Foster and Cohen 2007), we point out that our article was a description of a test of a hypothesis. Piker's (this issue) criticism of our paper is grounded in the differences between historians and anthropological archaeologists. The historic literature that Piker (this issue) cited does not inform about whether or not Creek Indians hunted where we performed the sediment cores. It merely points out that Creek hunters may have hunted with greater frequency elsewhere. But that is irrelevant to our study, which tested whether the eighteenth-century deerskin trade increased the frequency of forest fires in a particular region. Archaeologists will benefit from using historical documents but archaeologists still have to be clear about the potential biases of those interdisciplinary data sources.

Three palynological cores from the coastal plain of Georgia and Alabama were analyzed for paleobotanical remains. Results show that the Indians of southeastern North America increased forest fires used in hunting as a response to the demand for deer hides during the early eighteenth century. Palynological data are consistent with known anthropogenic changes in the region. Charcoal abundance increased significantly between A.D. 1715 and 1770, which is the period of the most intensive hunting by the Indians. This study shows that forest fires from hunting had a significant and measurable effect on the evolution of the biophysical environment.