[Terrapreta] The Reason for Pottery Shards in Terra Preta. Re: Char and compost ( was Char made made under pressurized conditions? )

[lou gold]

Hi Tom,

I believe that I can understand how all the speculation about pottery might
be misunderstood as an overemphasis on a single ingredient. Respectfully, I
would like to suggest that there is something more going on here. The
pottery has consistently emerged as a "puzzle" because it is something that
no one can quite get a handle on according to our standard mindset about
science and agriculture. It's easy to understand soil amendments --
fertilizers, carbon, chemicals, whatever. But pottery shards... ????

For me, the pottery shards have functioned heuristically, pushing my
thinking toward questions that are larger than what is the specific recipe
of material ingredients for the making of *terra preta de indio* soil.

I want to know how and what these people learned (evidently) about how to
maintain large populations of humans living in a sustainable relationship
with the earth. In a modern world, now heading toward 9 billion people, this
seems to me to be the most important question on earth. It's answer may hold
the secret for our specie's continued earthly existence (and that of a lot
of other species as well).

The pottery shards in the soil suggest a fundamental problem as well as an
equally fundamental answer to me:

The problem (IMHO) is that our mainstream understanding of agricultural
science is based largely on the history of mega civilizations that grew and
evolved along a path of ever-increasing separation from nature. I speculate
(because I'm not familiar with the literature) that the formal history of
agricultural science does not include much information about the
agricultural practices of the people of pre-history or even of more
contemporary indigenous cultures. It is a science of increasing efficiency,
increasing productivity, increasing scale and increasing control over what
might be called "natural". For example, nature's tendency is to push toward
diversity and variety while modernity favors the efficiencies of
mono-cultural sameness and control. Modernity has an incredible track record
of achieving its production goals -- largely by mining various natural
legacies such as oil and soil into depletion. But, dominant modern
agriculture appears to know little about sustainability. It knows how to
mine but not how to maintain.

Of course, there is a minority tradition within modern agricultural  --
organics, natural methods, permaculture, etc. My impression is that the
leading lights of natural farming -- such as Sir Albert Howard or Masanobu
Fukuoka -- have basically said, "for good farming, copy the ways of the
forest." And how might we express the core principle of the the "forest's
ways?" I believe that it can be captured with the simple phrase, NO WASTE.
Nada. Nothing. Everything that dies there, stays there. The remains of the
past sustain and maintain the present and give resilience for future
generations. The system is not extractive, it is reciprocal.

I believe that it is the reciprocity of no waste, of returning EVERYTHING to
the soil that was the fundamental mindset of the Amazonian Indians who gave
us the "miracle" of *terra preta*. I find the huge accumulation of pottery
shards in the soil as emblematic of reciprocity, of returning everything to
the earth. I further believe that this understanding arose within an
agriculture of a forest people and not an urban one. Ours is an agriculture
designed to support cities; theirs was an agricultural designed to maintain
the forest. Ours gives us cycles of productivity and depletion. Theirs
created a living soil.

OK, I know that what I am saying is speculative but it satisfies my
intuition. Perhaps it wil satisfy some of you as well.

hugs and blessing,

lou








On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Tom Miles <tmiles at trmiles.com> wrote:

>  The intense interest in, and speculation about, pottery has been amusing.
> It keeps coming up as an element of interest. From my reading of Amazonian
> Dark Earths and other references it may be a symbol of disposal practices
> but it is only one component of many, including food wastes and other
> sources of minerals and plant nutrients, that apparently went into terra
> preta. If someone has the time and patience it would be useful to cite
> specific archeological references and interpretations of the pottery issue.
>  I'm sure that it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining as the current thread
> of speculation.
>
>
>
> Tom
>
> _______________________________________________
> Terrapreta mailing list
> Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/biochar/
> http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org
> http://info.bioenergylists.org
>



-- 
http://lougold.blogspot.com
http://flickr.com/visionshare/sets
http://youtube.com/my_videos
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /attachments/20080402/b7785506/attachment.html