[Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 15, Issue 14

Tue Apr 8 14:48:58 CDT 2008

Nikolaus,

I'm sure that what you are saying is true for village life - both  
past and present.  But if the Amazonian valley 500 years ago, was as  
well organized as for example to build straight roads connecting  
villages into cities, then it was much more organized in other ways  
too.  A heirarchal society - as it seems to have been as evidenced  
from sophisticated ceremonial remnants still practised by a few  
tribes in the Amazon - inevitably develops rules and regulations to  
govern its people.  Thus it could well have developed rules for  
sanitation, and where are we allowed to dump this?

I wouldn't want to argue that these peoples consciously developed a  
system to improve soils.  But it's possible that, due to their  
crowded conditions, they developed a disposal system which solved  
both their sanitation (human excreta) and garbage (broken pottery  
instead of plastic bottles and bags) headaches, and inadvertently  
improved soil fertility.

Gerrit
>
>
>
>
> Dear All¨
>
> I live in Bolivia on a farm and next to our farm are several small
> indigenous villages or house gatherings where the original people  
> still live
> as they did hundreds of years ago. They have, as we have a certain  
> need to
> clean the houses from trash and the main place and the surroundings  
> of the
> houses. Everything starting with rests of fruits and gardening as  
> well rests
> of food and cooking is thrown into a pit in the backyard. Nowadays  
> some have
> chicken and pigs so part of those thrown away organic materials are  
> still
> taken as food from those animals what did not happen before the  
> Spanish
> arrived because they had no chicken and pigs before. The fires  
> which burn
> all day and long into the night to spook the mosquitoes away  
> produce huge
> amounts of badly burned rests and ashes. The simple pottery they  
> use are a
> short life pottery, they fall down, the dogs or pigs or children  
> brake it,
> the pottery is not very heat resistant so brake easily when put  
> into fire
> with something cooking in it etc. so there is a good amount of broken
> pottery a day in the village which as well is thrown into the trash  
> pit in
> the backyard. The defecation as well is done next to the pit and  
> thrown into
> it, to clean their ass, leaves and corncobs are the most used items  
> which as
> well end up in the pit. So if you have a closer look at the content  
> of the
> pit then you see that's an accumulation of a lot of minerals like  
> potassium,
> phosphorus, nitrogen, magnesium ,calcium etc. If you do a mass  
> balance over
> 100 years or more its a simple mineral dump because with all that  
> rain the
> organics after 3 to 6 weeks are all eaten up by bacteria and fungi  
> and what
> is left is slower degrading bones from animals, lignin and some  
> cellulose.
> After 500 years in such high water and high temperature  
> environments even
> the bones and lignin etc . Are irecognizeable mineralized .
> So there is no meaningful wise man or ethnic which studied how to  
> rise the
> fertility of the soils , no complicated thinking about cationic  
> exchange
> capacity or nitrogen influence in crop production etc. it is as  
> simple as it
> can get it is a series of dumpsters with over time interconnected.  
> Those
> people had and still have several village like compounds which they  
> visit
> regularly what means when the population of eat able animals is  
> down due to
> over hunting they simply move on some kilometers and stay in the  
> next place
> one or two seasons and after several years they come back to always  
> the same
> places and erect again some very primitive housings and the cycle  
> starts
> over again.
> You have to have in mind that under these conditions where you  
> spend 95% of
> your time for surviving and where everybody has the same workload  
> just to
> survive there is not much room for experiments and development.  
> That's the
> reason why they are still 5000 years back in there social and human
> developement.Untill they develope a social network with different  
> functions
> for different social groups in the village they wont have people  
> freed from
> the dally workload of surviving so they can dedicate time for  
> development of
> the same group.
> If somebody will have a look at our dumpsters in some 2000 years  
> from now
> the same esoteric discussion about the deeper meaning of  
> accumulating things
> in the dumpster will happen. What do you think why did the  
> accumulate flat
> glass peaces and half round glass peaces so evenly distributed in the
> surrounding soil? Is it possible that they had a growing system  
> where they
> avoided humidity loss from the soil covering the soil around the  
> plants with
> different types of glasses, did they filter out different damaging  
> light
> waves with different colors? And reality is : its a dumpster where  
> we throw
> our waste in without thinking very much about the consequences.
>
> That's it , don't interpret things in terra preta which never where  
> there,
> its a dumpster.
>
> Best regards Nikolaus
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Terrapreta mailing list
> Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
> http://bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/ 
> terrapreta_bioenergylists.org
> http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org
> http://info.bioenergylists.org
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Terrapreta mailing list
> Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
> http://bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/ 
> terrapreta_bioenergylists.org
> http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org
> http://info.bioenergylists.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Terrapreta mailing list
> Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
> http://bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/ 
> terrapreta_bioenergylists.org
> http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org
> http://info.bioenergylists.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /attachments/20080408/ea6d5936/attachment.html 