As residential development continues into flammable landscapes, wildfires increasingly threaten homes, lives, and livelihoods in the so-called ‘wildland-urban interface’ or WUI. Although this problem seems distinctly modern, Native American communities have lived in WUI contexts for centuries. When carefully considered, the past offers valuable lessons for coexisting with wildfire, climate change, and related challenges. Here, Dr. Roos combines archaeology, ethnography, dendrochronology, geoarchaeology, and ecological modeling to show that ancestors of Native Americans from Jemez Pueblo used ecologically savvy intensive burning and wood collection to make their ancient WUI resistant to climate variability and extreme fire behavior. Learning from the past offers modern WUI communities more options for addressing contemporary fire challenges. Public-private-tribal partnerships for wood and fire management can offer paths forward to restore fire-resilient WUI communities.