Posted on 09/06/2010 8:42:43 AM PDT by Palter
To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines.
Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands.
The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical black hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor to have ever sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, the assumption went, could ever have eked out a living in an unforgiving environment.
But scientists now think that instead of stone-age tribes, like the groups that occasionally emerge from the forest today, the Indians who inhabited the Amazon centuries ago numbered as many as 20 million, far more people than live here today.
"There is a gigantic footprint in the forest," said Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, 49, a Colombian-born professor at the University of Florida who is working this swath in northeast Peru.
Stooping over a man-made Indian mound on a recent day, he picked up shards of ceramics and dark, nutrient-rich earth made fertile hundreds of years ago by human hands. "All you can see is an artifact of the past," he said. "It's a product of human actions," he said.
The evidence is not just here outside tiny San Martin de Samiria, an indigenous hamlet hours by speed boat from the jungle city of Iquitos. It is found across Amazonia.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Jove! Percy Fawcett was right!
Step by step instructions for the DIY with lots of cool pics.
US Aid dough going into the soil or your tax dollars at work in yet another furrin country
Lots of cool sites and DIY for upgrading the old garden. We are going to try this next year for the old patatoe patch.
Charcoal is the key ingredient of terra preta soil. But simply adding charcoal doesn’t quite do it.
One interesting thing about Terra Preta soil is that it apparently grows. Some think that’s due to worms eating good soil, and pooping out their castings in the clay.
The people who make the chemical NPK fertilizers would be not happy to see their business disappear.
Many people today do enrich their soil with charcoal. Any biomass, including grass clippings and newspapers, can be turned into charcoal, quickly, easily and safely. 2 metal cans, one fitting into the other, is all it really takes.
The creation of charcoal from biomass and using it to enrich soil also is apparently good for the environment, as it sequesters carbon.
Some people would rather implement a complicated tax scheme to “solve” the carbon “problem”.
Burning newspapers, turning them into charcoal, and burying the charcoal in your backyard is too easy and doesn’t help the government destroy the economy and enrich Goldman Sachs.
If someone is looking for a way to make money, a $20 “charcoal maker”, a $40 device that injects charcoal deep into clay soil, things like that could sell.
The areas they are discussing have deep topsoil, up to 6 feet deep. Entrepreneurs are figuring out how to recreate quickly what took the Amazonians generations. It is the stuff of hippies’ dreams(except the part about hard work) but it is real.
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To my knowledge the one thing you’d have to have in major quantity to do anything with the Amazon basin would be DDT.
Now that's really fascinating
Now that's really fascinating
Sounds like East LA.
That otta drive the enviro-nazis buggy.
What a *coincidence*, eh? ;’)
I had hoped to learn from the better informed here if the two photos were more than just coincidence.
They seem remarkably similar, especially to those Easter Island figures where the hats have been replaced.
The top picture, is that from South America?
Did climate have anything to do with this? It looks like the remains coincide with the height of the Little Ice Age.
I think the dates are medieval.
Wasn’t the Little Ice Age on by 1400?
He’s got some, uh, problems, check out the rest of this page. I included just the amusing sentence below. :’)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlomo_Sand
“His main areas of teaching are nationalism, film as history and French intellectual history.”
Right. Sorry, that other reply went in the wrong winda.
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