[Terrapreta] Pottery Shards

[Gerald Van Koeverden]

Is the deep burial of charcoal and shard material necessarily so  
wasteful or excessive in a culture so totally dependant on agriculture?

Recently, we had someone post a message on a university experiment in  
Missouri on burying sawdust at those same depths merely for moisture  
retention purposes!  The deep burial of highly porous materials in TP  
soils would both serve as a very effective nutrient sponge during the  
torrential rainy season, as well as water storage for growing crops  
in the dry season.  There might not be a lot of microbial activity  
below the first foot, but there is some, because there is definitely  
root growth lower down. (For example, it's not uncommon to find  
Alfalfa roots reaching 40 feet deep. This plant is notorious for  
drying out soils.)

Of course deep burial of materials would require a lot of labour;   
but ancient civilizations have been known to carry out very extensive  
public works even for merely ceremonial purposes, for instance the  
building of the pyramids...In the TP case, it could be that groups of  
citizens were required to work together to make and bury a given  
amount of materials over a given area each year as their clan's  
social contribution.

Of course, such communal effort is unthinkable in our present day  
individualistic and specialized labour age, except in the case of  
emergencies.  We still have it through the mechanism that a  
significant percentage of our income goes to taxes to support  
services like education, research, policing, postal service, sewage,  
law courts, roads, pensions, medical facilities, etcetera which are  
then provided back to us as community services.  But before extensive  
specialization -  when 90% of the population were farmers and before  
the extensive use of money or the notion of private property (private  
property was not a popular concept in Amerindian culture) -  citizens  
provided labour for community projects...

Just a thought...

Gerrit


On 21-Dec-07, at 8:53 PM, Kevin Chisholm wrote:

> Dear Gerrit
>
> Thanks very much.
>
> In this case, where the "country soil" was mixed in, it suggests a  
> purposeful addition of char to the soil, much as we are proposing  
> to do now.
>
> However, there are reported instances of TP soils being 1 to 2  
> meters thick. This doesn't make practical sense to me, in view of  
> the enormous quantities of char they would have to produce to build  
> 1 to 2 meters of TP, with little to no benefit from anything more  
> than about 25 cm depth.
>
> Is it perhaps possible that the 1 and 2 meter deep deposits were  
> simply a place where char was dumped and stored for hater recovery  
> and use on the fields? Or, that perhaps it was an anaerobically  
> decomposed compost pit?
>
> Can you see a possible explanation for teh apparent wasteful and  
> excessive TP depths being reported?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Kevin
>
> Gerald Van Koeverden wrote:
>> I've read that the mineral portion of TP and adjacent yellow soils  
>> are exactly the same texture (particle size distribution) showing  
>> that they both are of the exactly same geological origin.
>>
>> Gerrit
>>
>> On 21-Dec-07, at 6:30 PM, Kevin Chisholm wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> One question on Terra Petra, Was the original light coloured  
>>>> Amazon top soil found to be mixed through the black Terra Petra?
>>>
>
>