As fire is increasingly used as a restoration and management tool throughout the Pacific Northwest (PNW), it is important to understand the factors influencing historical fire regimes. For ecosystems with long histories of human activity, this requires looking beyond the past 200 years, when Euro-American disease and settlements reduced the majority of the Native American influence on the landscape. Paleoecological records provide reliable information on vegetation change and fire history, but these records should be balanced with archaeological, ethnographic and historical information for areas where fire regimes are influenced by both ecological and anthropogenic drivers.