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Post by mnjrutherford on Dec 2, 2010 17:14:21 GMT -5
There's a really good thread on terra preta here on the forum. I'll have to figure out how to link to it. I personally disagree with your assertion that the charcoal is the key to composition. I think the purpose of the pits was more important. Since it is really mostly guessing at this point (have you read any new research evidence within the last couple years?) it's all premise and hypotheses. We are in the second year of testing our theory which is that the pits were started as community garbage piles that were kept fired. We have 2 side by side pits. We spend 1 year building and burning the pile. The second year the pile is raked flat and allowed to "cure" for 1 year. At the end of the curing period (March 2011) we will get the contents of the first pit tested. I think our second pit will be much better than the first because we've obtained some corpses and a lot more manure and vegetative material to add. My husband also made a couple really valuable modifications to the structure, a drain so that the mass does not become water logged at the bottom layers and a pipe that goes into the bottom center of the pile which really helps keep a slow and steady fire going over a longer period of time. I'd really love to hear more of what you have to say about the subject...  |
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Post by mnjrutherford on Dec 2, 2010 17:17:26 GMT -5
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Post by steev on Dec 2, 2010 19:19:28 GMT -5
I have often thought there is little reason so much produce needs to be transported during local growing seasons, since it's so easy to grow a little something, if only in a container, but people are lazy, ignorant, pessimistic, whatever. Today I read about the First Lady's efforts to promote better school nutrition and I wonder why this hasn't been done long since until I remember that people are LIPW. There shouldn't be a school in this country that doesn't have a garden. How many schools don't have sports programs? How are sports more important than food and how it happens? Sports are promoted as fostering community; fine. Fostering relating to the natural environment, to the non-human world, is less important? Nowhere is this estrangement from nature more glaring than in our urban schools, so many of which no longer teach useful, saleable skills; are we all to be cubicle drones? This world wasn't developed by people with uncalloused, unstained hands. Often among the landscaping of highway ramps I notice apple or plum trees, but I never notice that they get picked; even the homeless don't seem to grasp that this is food. I rant, often.
Gardeners are such optimists because it promotes optimism to do something slow and contemplative; it's calming to see that rot becomes rebirth, that big things start small, that we belong in the world.
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Post by paquebot on Dec 4, 2010 1:59:00 GMT -5
BUT, terra preta is NOT what those people grew their crops on. Those terre preta mounds are the remains of where they lived. The soil that the crops were grown in was terra mulata and not nearly as rich. An interesting thing about both is the presence of a lot of bone charcoal. There weren't many large meat animals other than a tapir now and then. We know that those people were quick to sacrifice a life, or a lot of lives, to assure a good harvest or any other good fortune. Hundreds of thousands people overall and not a single cemetery. They instead became the fertilizer for the next generation as part of the terra mulata.
Martin
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Post by paquebot on Dec 4, 2010 15:07:42 GMT -5
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Post by nuts on Dec 5, 2010 16:47:47 GMT -5
BUT, terra preta is NOT what those people grew their crops on. Those terre preta mounds are the remains of where they lived. The soil that the crops were grown in was terra mulata and not nearly as rich. An interesting thing about both is the presence of a lot of bone charcoal. There weren't many large meat animals other than a tapir now and then. We know that those people were quick to sacrifice a life, or a lot of lives, to assure a good harvest or any other good fortune. Hundreds of thousands people overall and not a single cemetery. They instead became the fertilizer for the next generation as part of the terra mulata. Martin So,these people killed each other to fertilise the land,and were living on a fertile waste dump while cultivating the bad soils. Not very clever those indiens,but the historian that found out these things must be very clever. |
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Dec 5, 2010 20:22:19 GMT -5
Interesting discussion. I too like planting things that aren't supposed to be able to survive here. A perfect example of this is my Golden Kiwi plant that i started from seed. From everything i've read it's only supposed to survive to 10 degrees F. And there are plenty of times it has gotten colder here in the winter. Last winter it reached at least 0 degrees. And yet, the kiwi is still doing just as well, and in some way's better than the two "hardy" kiwi's we also planted. We live in zone 4 and 5. I only planted the kiwi few years ago, but i don't expect it to die anytime soon. Yeah, the terra preta and Amazon farming stuff is really cool. i even posted a link to a video about it on my blog about a year ago. keen101.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/the-secret-of-el-dorado-watch-free-documentary-online/I'm not sure if this fits within your discussion, as i have only been skimming through the posts, but an interesting ecological experiment done on an uninhabited island produced some very interesting results, and not many people seem to know about it.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11137903 |
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Post by paquebot on Dec 6, 2010 1:27:31 GMT -5
Nuts, look at what the latest findings are according to Wiki. The more studies are made, the more it becomes obvious that the mounds are the remains of many years of living in one place. Living on the high ground has always been the one thing common among humans, especially in areas subject to flooding. After generations of rebuilding on the same spot, one builds over whatever accumulated from the previous generations.
The terra mulata lacks pottery shards and other items which would be associated with a home. Those things are found in the terra preta mounds. They would have become rich from all things associated with normal survival such as food preparation and shelter. There would also be the matter of their own excrement since there weren't any sewage plants. The inhabitants weren't going to run out into the fields in the middle of the night when they'd instead go on the back side of the shelter. It's known where the fields were as the outlines and disturbed soil is still there. That is the majority of the area involved in that civilization. That's the terra mulata, which is less fertile, and the main foreign element is charcoal.
There's also the matter of the lack of human burial remains. They didn't simply turn into dust and blow away. Cremation has been the main disposal of the dead for thousands of years among some peoples. Aztec, Inca, and Maya civilizations were all big on sacrifices and known to carry it out on a big scale at times. They offered up sacrifices for many reasons and there's no reason to think that harvests wasn't one of them. It all makes sense when all the "whys" are researched. And to put it bluntly, no, they did not know what they were doing when building their terra preta mounds. They were merely going through the actions of living from day to day in a 100% subsistence life.
Martin
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Post by nuts on Dec 7, 2010 18:16:59 GMT -5
Martin,
People who create infrastructures for their agriculture are not people that are living day to day.
But for some reason you seem to be sure that they were unorganised,stupid and cruel.
You can learn from the reports from the spanish colonisators that the cruelty of the
spanish farly exceeded that of the indigenous people.
But I never heard of Spanish men killing people for fertilising the fields. ;D
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Post by castanea on Dec 7, 2010 23:15:39 GMT -5
BUT, terra preta is NOT what those people grew their crops on. Those terre preta mounds are the remains of where they lived. The soil that the crops were grown in was terra mulata and not nearly as rich. An interesting thing about both is the presence of a lot of bone charcoal. There weren't many large meat animals other than a tapir now and then. We know that those people were quick to sacrifice a life, or a lot of lives, to assure a good harvest or any other good fortune. Hundreds of thousands people overall and not a single cemetery. They instead became the fertilizer for the next generation as part of the terra mulata. Martin So,these people killed each other to fertilise the land,and were living on a fertile waste dump while cultivating the bad soils. Not very clever those indiens,but the historian that found out these things must be very clever. No one knows how the terra preta was created. Martin certainly doesn't. |
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Post by paquebot on Dec 8, 2010 10:29:47 GMT -5
No one knows how the terra preta was created. Martin certainly doesn't. Just about every possible source of information on terra preta and terra mulata is available through that wikipedia site. Not only is it known how it was created, it is also known where else in the world it exists. Martin |
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Dec 8, 2010 10:39:42 GMT -5
How true. Someone really should take the time to research why terra preta is different. I have my own theory, and i don't think it's hard to understand if you are in the right frame of mind. I think it is mostly about the microorganism diversity living in the soil. The thousands of yeasts, molds, and other fungi, along with thousands of bacteria, all help to break down nutrients much better than sterile soil, or plants by themselves ever could. I think it's been discovered that nitrogen fixing legumes might not be actually fixing the nitrogen themselves, but producing something in their roots that encourages the growth of nitrogen fixing bacteria. I think the charcoal is very important, but only because it provides a Carbon source for all these microorganisms to survive. Living things need much more than just carbon to reproduce, so a pure charcoal environment certainly wouldn't be desired either. Plenty of Carbon, Phosphorus, Nitrogen, and water (Hydrogen and Oxygen), all all essential for DNA. Both for a healthy plant population, but also beneficial microorganisms. I don't think we should keep "hijacking" this thread about terra preta anymore, so i will be double posting this into the terra preta thread that mnjrutherford so helpfully provided. I suggest that anyone who want to continue to specifically talk about terra preta reply here: alanbishop.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=soilbuilding&thread=1862&page=1...as for actually testing this theory of mine, one could probably just get two petri dishes of nutrient agar, and drop a clump of unenriched soil, and in the other drop a clump of terra preta, and observe which dish has more fungi and bacterial biodiversity. |
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Post by paquebot on Dec 8, 2010 12:15:58 GMT -5
It is still an ongoing practice by the indigenous people of the Amazon. They live in a communal village consisting of one large building made from strictly what the forests provide. There may be as many as 400 living in it. Every 1 or 2 years, it must be rebuilt and is done so on the remains of the previous one. That many people generate considerable waste material which can quickly become a large mound. That becomes what we know as a terra preta mound. They also still cremate all of the dead. Not only do they cremate them but they also eat them. The system used for agriculture is slash and burn. It's done on a rotational basis with worn out land allowed to revert back to the wild and then start over. Over a few thousand years of that, charcoal from the wood builds up and becomes what we know as terra mulata fields. There was one simple description of terra preta being a mix of charcoal, bones, and manure. No problem to make charcoal when surrounded by huge tropical hardwoods. But inasmuch as there were no domestic animals, ever wonder what would be the source of the other 2 main ingredients?
Martin
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Post by nuts on Dec 8, 2010 17:02:46 GMT -5
Martin, ok,"they" lived on terra preta mounts in big huts in the forest,practiced slash and burn,were cannibals. You think they ate so many humans that the mounts contain large amounts of human bones. They eat each other because they don't have domestic animals.   well, maybe they are hunters ;D And anyway I don't think a society with the habit of eating each other on a daily base will be very succesful ;D ;D very interesting,but maybe "they" were not the same that create the infrastructures mentioned in the article Silverseeds referred to. Just a thought.... |
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Post by paquebot on Dec 8, 2010 18:19:47 GMT -5
And anyway I don't think a society with the habit of eating each other on a daily base will be very succesful ;D ;D It's not my fault that you refuse to do any research on it whatsoever for fear of being found wrong. One needs to search for just one word, Yanomami. They no longer control as much of the Amazon as in pre-Colombian times but have managed to survive quite well without adapting a European way of living. Martin |
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