Golly, Charlie, the latest page turner I've got my nose buried in is
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelatio...mbus/dp/140003
2059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239149562&sr=1-1

I was just crusin' through the pages when I came across your ol' buddy,
"Terra Preta". Turns out, Amazonian culture is the only one to ever make
soil in the tropics. Course, they had to do somethin' cause tropical
soils have been leached of all soluble nutrients which makes it very
hard to farm there. But these "hearties", they figured it out.

Now, a few things may not make sense but that's because you are coming
in in the middle of the movie, so to speak. If'in ya wants more, you'll
have to head on down to the library.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if you find some typos in the following
scan. When you find them, I'll fix 'em.

p.344

GIFT FROM THE PAST
"Landscape," in this case, is meant exactly‹Amazonian Indians literally
created the ground beneath their feet. According to Susanna Hecht, a
geographer at the University of California at Los Angeles, researchers
into upland Amazonia took most of their soil samples along the region's
highways, which indeed passed through areas with awful soil‹some regions
were so saturated with toxic aluminum that they are now being mined for
bauxite. A few scientists, though, found patches of something better.
"In part because of the empty-Amazon model," Hecht told me, these were
"seen as anomalous and insignificant." But in the 1990s researchers
began studying these unusual regions of terra preta do India‹rich,
fertile "Indian dark earth" that anthropologists believe was made by
human beings.

Throughout Amazonia, farmers prize terra preta for its great
productivity; some have worked it for years with minimal fertilization.
Among them are the owners of the papaya orchard I visited, who have
happily grown crops on their terra preta for two decades. More
surprising still, the ceramics in the farm's terra preta indicate that
the soil has retained its nutrients for as much as a millennium. On a
local fevel, terra preta is valuable enough for locals to dig it up and
sell as potting soil, an activity that, alas, has already destroyed
countless artifacts. To the consternation of archaeologists, long
planters full of ancient terra preta, complete with pre-Columbian
potsherds, greet vistors to the Santarem airport. Because terra preta is
subject to the same punishing conditions as the surrounding bad soils,
"its existence is very surprising," according to Bruno Glaser, a chemist
at the Institute of Soil Science and Soil Geography at the University of
Bayreuth, Germany. "If you read the textbooks, it shouldn't be there."*


*Terra preta exists in two forms: terra preta itself, a black soil thick
with pottery, and terra, mulata, a lighter dark brown soil with much
less pottery. A number of researchers believe that although Indians made
both, they deliberately created only the terra mulata. Terra preta was
the soil created directly around homes by charcoal kitchen fires and
organic refuse of various types. I use terra preta loosely to cover both.

Because careful surveys of Amazon soils have never been taken, nobody
knows the amount and distribution of terra preta. Woods has guessed that
terra preta might represent as much as 10 percent of the Amazon basin,
an area the size of France. A recent, much more conservative estimate is
that it covers .1 to .3 percent of the basin, a few thousand square
miles. The big difference between these numbers matters less than one
might expect: a few thousand square miles of farmland was enough to feed
the millions in the Maya heartland.

Most big terra preta sites are on low bluffs at the edge of the
flood-plain. Typically, they cover five to fifteen acres, but some
encompass seven hundred or more. The layer of black soil is generally
one to two feet deep but can reach more than six feet. According to a
recent study led by Dirse Kern, of the Museu Goeldi in Belem, terra
preta is "not associated with a particular parent soil type or
environmental condition," suggesting that it was not produced by natural
processes. Another clue to its human origin is the broken ceramics with
which it is usually mixed. "They practiced agriculture here for
centuries," Glaser told me. "But instead of destroying the soil, they
improved it, and that is something we don't know how to do today" in
tropical soils.

As a rule, terra preta has more "plant-available" phosphorus, calcium,
sulfur, and nitrogen than is common in the rain forest; it also has much
more organic matter, better retains moisture and nutrients, and is not
rapidly exhausted by agricultural use when managed well. The key to
terra preta's long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra preta
contains up to sixty-four times more of it than surrounding red earth.
Organic matter "sticks" to charcoal, rather than being washed away or
attaching to other, nonavailable compounds. "Over time, it

p.346

partly oxidizes, which keeps providing sites for nutrients to bind to."
But simply mixing charcoal into the ground is not enough to create terra
preta. Because charcoal contains few nutrients, Glaser argued,
"high-nutrient inputs‹excrement and waste such as turtle, fish, and
animal bones‹are necessary." Special soil microorganisms are also likely
to play a role in its persistent fertility, in the view ofJanice Thies,
a soil ecologist who is part of a Cornell University team studying terra
preta. "There are indications that microbial biomass is higher in terra
preta than in other forest soils," she told me, which raises the
possibility that scientists might be able to create'a "package" of
charcoal, nutrients, and microfauna that could be used to transform bad
tropical soil into terra preta.

Despite the charcoal, terra preta is not a by-product of slash-and-burn
agriculture. To begin with, slash-and-burn simply does not produce
enough charcoal to make terra preta‹the carbon mostly goes teto the air
in the form of carbon dioxide. Instead, Indians apparently made terra
preta by a process that Christoph Steiner, a University of Bayreuth soil
scientist, has dubbed "slash-and-char." Instead of completely burning
organic matter to ash, ancient farmers burned it incompletely to make
charcoal, then stirred the charcoal into the soil. In addition to its
benefits to the soil, slash-and-char releases much less carbon into the
air than slash-and-burn, which has large potential implications for
climate change. Trees store vast amounts of carbon in their trunks,
branches, and leaves. When they die or people cut them down, the carbon
is usually released into the atmosphere, driving global warming.
Experiments by Makoto Ogawa of the Kansai Environmental Engineering
Center, near Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated that charcoal retains its carbon
in the soil for up to fifty thousand years. "Slash-and-char is very
clever," Ogawa told me. "Nobody in Europe or Asia that I know of ever
understood the properties of charcoal in soil."

Indians are still making terra preta in this way, according to Hecht,
the UCLA geographer. Hecht spent years with the Kayapo, in central
Amazonia, watching them create "low-biomass" fires "cool enough to walk
through" of pulled-up weeds, cooking waste, crop debris, palm fronds,
and termite mounds. Burning, she wrote, is constant:
"To live among the Kayapo is to live in a place where parts of the
landscape smolder." Hecht regards Indian fire as an essential part of
the Amazonian landscape, as it was in the forests of eastern North
America. "We've got to get over this whole Bambi syndrome," she told me,
referring to the movie's forest-fire scene, which has taught generations
of children that burning wildlands is evil. "Let the Kayapo burn the
rainforest‹they know what they're doing."

In a preliminary test run at creating terra preta, Steiner, Wenceslau
Teixeira of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Enterprise, and Wol-fang
Zech of the University of Bayreuth applied a variety of treatments
involving charcoal and fertilizers for three years to rice and sorghum
plots outside Manaus. In the first year, there was little difference
among the treatments (except for the control plots, in which almost
nothing grew). By the second year, Steiner said, "the charcoal was
really making a difference." Plots with charcoal alone grew little, but
those treated with a combination of charcoal and fertilizer yielded as
much as 880 percent more than plots with fertilizer alone. His "terra
preta" was this productive, Steiner told me, despite making no attempt
to re-create the ancient microbial balance.

Beginning a little more than two thousand years ago, the central and
lower Amazon were rocked by extreme cultural change. Arawak-speaking
groups migrated in from the south and west, sometimes apparently driving
Tupi-speaking groups north and east. Sedentary villages appeared. And so
did terra preta. No one yet knows if or how these events were related.
By about the time of Christ the central Amazon had at least some large,
settled villages‹Neves, Petersen, and Bartone excavated one on a high
bank about thirty miles up the Rio Negro. Judging by carbon dating and
the sequence of ceramics, they believe the site was inhabited in two
waves, from about 360 b.c., when terra preta formation began, to as late
as 1440 a.d. "We haven't finished working, but there seems to be a
central plaza and some defensive ditches there," Petersen told me. The
plaza was at least a quarter mile long; the ditch, more than three
hundred feet long and up to eighteen feet wide and six feet deep: "a
big, permanent settlement."

Terra preta showed up at the papaya plantation between 620 and 720 a.d.
By that time it seems to have been underneath villages throughout the
central Amazon. Several hundred years later it reached the upper Xingu,
a long Amazon tributary with its headwaters deep in southern Brazil.
People had lived around the Xingu for a long time, but around 1100 or
1200 a.d., Arawak-speaking people appear to have moved in, jostling
shoulders with people who spoke a Tupi-Guarani language. In 2003
Heckenberger, who had worked with

Petersen and Neves, announced in Science that in this area he and his
colleagues had turned up remains of nineteen large villages linked by a
network of wide roads "in a remarkably elaborate regional plan." Around
these settlements, which were in place between approximately 1250 and
1400 a.d., theXinguanos built "bridges, artificial river obstructions
and ponds, raised causeways, canals, and other structures ... a highly
elaborate built environment, rivaling that of many contemporary complex
societies of the Americas and elsewhere." The earlier inhabitants left
no trace of terra preta; the new villages quickly set down thick
deposits of black earth. "To me," Woods said, "it looks as if someone
invented it, and the technique spread to the neighbors."

One of the biggest patches of terra preta is on the high bluffs at the
mouth of the Tapajos, near Santarem. First mapped in the 1960s by the
late Wim Sombroek, director of the International Soil Reference and
Information Center in Wageningen, the Netherlands, the terra. preta zone
is three miles long and half a mile wide, suggesting wide-spread human
habitation‹exactly what Orellana saw. The plateau has never been
carefully excavated, but observations by geographers Woods and Joseph
McCann of the New School in New York City indicate that it is thick with
ceramics. If the agriculture practiced in the lower Tapajos were as
intensive as in the most complex cultures in precontact North America,
Woods told me, "you'd be talking something capable of supporting about
200,000 to 400,000 people"‹making it at the time one of the most densely
populated places in the world.

Woods was part of an international consortium of scientists studying
terra preta. If its secrets could be unraveled, he said, it might
improve the expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa‹
a final gift from the peoples who brought us tomatoes, maize, manioc,
and a thousand different ways of being human.

"Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying ihis," Woods told
me. "Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused." In 2001,
Meggers charged in an article in Latin American Antiquity that
archaeologists' claims that the Amazon could support intensive
agriculture were effectively telling "developers [that they] are
entitled to operate without restraint." These researchers had thus
become unwitting "accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental
degradation." Centuries after the conquistadors, she lamented, "the myth
of El Dorado is being revived by archaeologists."

Doubtless her political anxieties are not without justification,
although‹as some of her sparring partners observed‹it is difficult to
imagine greedy plutocrats "perusing the pages of Latin American
Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chainsaws." But the new picture
doesn't automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it
suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have
yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an
ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature,
they created it. They were in the midst of terra-forming the Amazon when
Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
--

- Billy
"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being
is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the
moment of conception until death." - Rachel Carson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI29wVQN8Go

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072040.html

In article , Charlie wrote:

Darn yer ornery hide, Mister Billy. You think I have nothing better
to do than *study* ? Don't I first have to go buy me one of those
degree things of which so many are so enamoured?

I checked with Louie the printer down at the "Afton Print Boutique". He
says he can print one up for you by the end of the week for $1,500.
Then I saw Miguel at the corner of 123 St. and Warehouse. He can have
one for you tonight for $20, $25 for a three color.

Man, I love my Mexicans:O)

Buenas noches Amigo,
--

- Billy
"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being
is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the
moment of conception until death." - Rachel Carson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI29wVQN8Go

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072040.html

In article , Charlie wrote:

On Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:27:21 -0700, Billy
wrote:

In article , Charlie wrote:

Darn yer ornery hide, Mister Billy. You think I have nothing better
to do than *study* ? Don't I first have to go buy me one of those
degree things of which so many are so enamoured?

As previously mentioned, "The Worst President Ever" got his degree from
Yale University with a low C average. Obviously, a degree is not an
artifact of intelligence. A degree is kinda like a prop that lends
credibility to the possibility of intelligence, i.e. you've all read the
same books, have the same vocabulary, and have used the same
instruments. Fortunately, none of that is important if you want to
participate in an archeological dig.
http://www.ubarchaeologist.com/Volunteer-Digs.html

Certainly is a tempting idea to leave the daily hum-drum for some exotic
spot where you might be the first person to touch an object in 2,000
years.

Even before I read about terra preta in "Gift from the Past" from 1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelatio...mbus/dp/140003
2059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239208187&sr=1-1
I had started dumping all the small bits of charcoal from my barbecue
into the garden. Often, the wood chips that I use for flavoring are
reduced to charcoal and look to be just the right size (small). If the
charcoal used for heating falls through the grill, it goes too. Mann's
book reminds me of "Island" by Aldous Huxley
http://www.amazon.com/Island-Perenni...ey/dp/00600854
95/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239208687&sr=1-3
which I must have read 50 years ago. In the encounter between the "Old
World" and the "New", it was the "New" that got crucified and for much
the same reason as that Jesus guy (innocence). Native Americans had
developed an amazing culture, but the records of it were, for the most
part, destroyed by intent by the Spanish, or neglect when native
populations and cultures collapsed from European diseases.

They had so much to teach us, as is just just becoming evident.

Appropriately depressing for this grey, rainy day here in the redwoods
of northern California.

Well, back to gardening. My next book is something called
"Bitter Fruit", Revised and Expanded (David Rockefeller Center Series on
Latin American Studies) by Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer, John H.
Coatsworth. I'm curious as to what kind of fruits those may be. It's
waiting for me now at the library, although I still have about 50 pages
to go in "1491".

Now where did I leave that bottle opener?
--

- Billy
"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being
is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the
moment of conception until death." - Rachel Carson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI29wVQN8Go

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072040.html

In article
,
Billy wrote:

.. Mann's
book reminds me of "Island" by Aldous Huxley
http://www.amazon.com/Island-Perenni...ey/dp/00600854

""Karuna Karuna" Here and now boys."

Bill wondering if you folks ever opened the pages of Ecotopia ?

http://www.amazon.com/Ecotopia-Ernes...8477/ref=sr_1_
1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239210850&sr=1-1

Just the reviews here are worth a look.

--
Garden in shade zone 5 S Jersey USA
Not all who wander are lost.
- J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

Some Hopi gardener said, "This is not about growing vegetables; it
is about growing kids."