[Terrapreta] The Reason for Pottery Shards in Terra Preta.

[Greg and April]

Interspaced at the ****************** .


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: lou gold 
  To: Greg and April 
  Cc: Terra Preta 
  Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 13:52
  Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] The Reason for Pottery Shards in Terra Preta.


  Greg,

  I went back and closely watched the bbc video. The apparent layering is much less clear than I had recalled and the site shown was from the central Amazon, not Bolivia. That pretty much blows away my speculation that the layers facilitated mound building.

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  Maybe, maybe not.

  There was one very distinct ( and fairly thick layer ) and perhaps 2 not so distinct layers and a scattering of other shards, so it's still possable.

  Remember WE only have video of one pit, and pic's of one or two .

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  I was intrigued by the depth of the presence of shards (many feet). This suggests repeated applications on top of the fields, building to quite a depth over time.  I think this was a human spreading rather than an action of water (which would tend to separate soil and ceramic content). 

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  Yes and no.    Pottery shards in water, would cause silt and debris to fall out of slowly moving water, thus causing them the be buried fairly quickly.


  Geological upheaval doesn't make sense because of the geological time line. This is human application.

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  Again, yes and no.
  It can, but unless it's due to a mid contental fault, or bulge due to geologic pressure from both sides of the contenent, is is normaly slow.    OTOH, there are places where geologic uplifting can be measured in centemeters per decade.

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  On balance, it looks a lot simpler than our speculations -- perhaps, just put everything into the dump and then spread it around after sufficient composting.

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  Or the dump was just realy big - we still don know if there was active composting on the part of the acent people, or they were acting in a way like we do, and when a low spot is sufficently filled with garbage, they top it off and find another use for it.

  This is why I say thay to get a better understanding of what they were doing we will probably need a full profile ( depth and extent of TP ) of various sites.    If the TP slowly get's shallower towards the edges, that could indicate that there was a filling type operation, while if it stops suddenly that could indicate that there was a specific plan in mind.

  Does that make sense?
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