[Terrapreta] Pottery Shards and Terra Preta

[Robert Klein]

hi lou



I am actually not making it very clear.  a sun dried plate would be
subjected to partial firing and a lot of cracking.  Depending on clay
quality a partially fired plate would end up in the biochar.   I would
expect it to be very breakable, if it had not broken up on the way in. 
A lot of it may also be very friable because of poor firing.  Add a few
hundred years of soaking and we should have something with seriously
degraded integrity.



I also expect that the Indians went out of their way to breakup any
larger pieces as they worked the seed hills but that is just a guess
until we replicate the process.  Archeology may even find dump sites
for collected waste pottery cleared from the fields



If my theory stands up, we actually have an excellent way of counting
the number of years in which this soil was manufactured or at least
estimating it within an acceptable margin of error by simply screening
out the pottery from a measured amount of soil.



arclein


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