We should let people rummage in dumps.

I've noticed that on a2k, the (to me) leap to get a new one, defensible I surmise for all the new capability. Which I can see for computer whizzes, but not all of us need massive computer capability. Which means, guys like my mac guy are probably hurting with the lease payments.

My first computer on my own was an early school mac (what was different about those than other macs, I've no idea), and I got it from the local Bargain Box.

The impression I've had from recent reading -- primarilyt "1491," but also a couple of other lay books -- is that the extent to which we've previously thought that Indians spread fire across the continent and the effect it had on mammalian populations has been historically underestimated. If what I've been reading is accurate, all across the continent huge swaths of forest were being deliberately burned even at a distance from occupied areas, and that the effect, deliberate or not, was to increase game populations in certain areas that were convenient for the settled populations to exploit. So, in effect, they were manipulating the land to their own purposes without ever occupying it, but in a fashion, because the land was never farmed, but instead was subjected to an accelerated versiuon of the effect wildfires have on established forests of large trees. This I took as a form of land use quite distinct from swidden agriculture. I don't necessarily think it makes them better stewards than anyone else -- if they'd had steel axes, I'm sure they would have been happy to cut the trees down as well, -- but it did strike me as a difference in appraoch to at least consider.

On the topic of swidden, though -- and at risk of yet another tangent (as if there were any real topic here) -- one of the interesting finds I read about was the discovery in the Amazon basin of an urban population far larger than that area was thought to be able to support. In analyzing the soil deposits around the settlement, archaeologists apparently came to the conclusion that they must have been burning undergrowth an a manner different than usually done today. There apparent.ly a very controlled burn of the vegetation to create, essentially, charcoal, where more of the nutrients from the burned material was retained in the soil rather than lost to cumbustion. Just a trivial item, but apparently folks are experimenting with it to see if they can make modern swidden ag in the Amazon basin at least be more efficient than it is at present.

What it comes down to for me, at least at present, in thinking about this topic is basically the central premise of "1491": it appears that people in the Americas shaped their environment on a scale that has not hitherto been appreciated, either by those who've thought that the place was inhabited by savages incapable of shaping their world or by some shamanic-type folks who endeavored to keep it in a natural state. Just by virtue of convergent social evolution in mutual isolation for millennia would have leed to a myriad of different approaches to land use in the eastern and western hemispheres, and I think it bears examination of those now lost to us -- as most of the pre-Colombian cultures are -- to see what there is to learn.

Or not, I dunno. I only really come here to bloviate or wisecrack.



Ain't no thing, jefe. I'm not sure what I'm getting at, either, and any time I try to put something down, it never quite comes up to what I've set out to say.

rainforest soils in te Mazon basin are sandy silt deposits leaning to sand. The copious rains are what support the huge vegetation stands and, if the areas are burned over the charcoal acts as a adsorbant so that any nutriemts could be retained wothout leaching away. The rain forests are really wet "deserts" with poor nutrient balances for crops. The Amazon cultures learned this quickly .

I think that the period of time between the PaleoIndian cultures and the first woodland culture, the climate changes went to extreme drought and colder, many more permanent populations like the SW and as far East as Kahokia were just abandoned as rainfalls were reduced by half and the terminal vegetation went from forest to savannah. Burning may not have all been a conscious thing. The Mid continental "impactor" in the 5000 BP time has been pretty much debunked and climate change has been been a more accepted hypothesis to explain the rise and fall of the big forests.

I haven't read 1491. I looked at it, but i was skeptical. I'd read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond and become wary of non-specialists coming to sweeping conclusions. I've read criticism of the claim that Amerindians were here 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, along with the claim that their impact was so low that it left no archaeological record. Convenient, no? If humans had come here 20,000 years ago, how did they get here? They'd have been obliged to come by sea, because there was no land bridge then. The life of the land bridge was short. It required the retreat of glaciation, but it also required a good deal of water to be still trapped in the ice cap so that the land bridge was exposed. That makes the 15,000-11,000 ybp period crucial for allowing the migration. Now, of course, they could have come by sea. If the Solutrean hypothesis is correct, those humans had to have come by sea. But a distinction to be made is that there are archaeological finds which could well be from a European human source more than 11,000 years ago.

Diamond's knowledge of stone age cutlures is excellent. His knowledge of the period of domestication of plants and animals is good, but not up to date. It now appears the the first domesticate was the fig, and by a matter of more than a thousand years. He was either unaware of this, or chose to ignore it as inconvenient to his hypothesis. He also ignores the success of Europeans in overcoming cultures that had guns, germs (by which he means diseases which arise from domestic animals) and steel. He ignores unique circumstances--Pizzaro seized Atahualpa when his empire had just emerged from a devastating civil war, and no successor was on the scene. The "Inca" were paralyzed by the seizure of Atahualpa, and had no response to his murder. They did rise against the Spaniard later, but by then the Spanish were well enough established to survive the uprising. He ignores that Cortés had, literally, thousands of Amerindian allies who were enthusiastic about defeating the Aztec. When it comes to history, Diamond is really out of his depth.

I should, i suppose, read 1491 and judge it on its merits. It's unfair, i know, but my experience with Diamond has left me skeptical of non-specialists doing historical synthesis. If you spend your lifetime doing other work, and then suddenly decide you can do historical revision, i'm unlikely to believe your synthesis because it will very likely be based on too little knowledge. I am also always wary of pat explanations. We know now, for example, the the single most important cause of the deaths of the members of the Franklin expedition was chronic lead poisoning. But that wasn't the only cause, it was just the most important. To really understand what happened, one needs to know the entire history of Canadian arctic and sub-arctic exploration by the Royal Navy from 1818 until the deaths of the last of Franklin's men in 1848. They made several bad decisions which were, nonetheless, justified in their eyes because of experiences of the two Rosses and Parry in arctic exploration. Scurvy, pneumonia, tuberculosis and botulism killed off crew members, and all of those conditions were made worse by the chronic lead poisoning. But even a lifetime of reading can be improved upon. It was not until i read a history of arctic exploration by expeditions sent out by John Barrow (first permanent second secretary of the Admiralty, holding that position for more than 4o years) that i realized that what i had always believed were truly inexplicable decisions by Franklin's survivors became understandable--especially as Franklin's first arctic expedition of 1819-22 was an overland expedition. They proved to be fatal decisions, but were justified based on the experiences of Franklin, John Ross, William Parry and James Ross. So, it was necessary for me to revise my opinion of the matter.

If someone who has spent a lifetime reading these subjects can still be educated after more than 40 years, how less likely are we to get good historical synthesis from people who, although gifted amateurs, are venturing into the exercise for the first time? People who use their credentials in subjects for which they are rightly admired to secure the publication of works for which they do not have the same credentials?

I really can't speak to the veracity of the material in 1491. I can tell you that I felt it a lot less "conclusive" than any of Jared Diamond's stuff, if you know what I mean. Where Diamond writes from the posture of a scientist, I feld that Mann was writing much more as a journalist. Subjects were presented independently, with a particular focus on new evidence from the past 20 or 30 years or so. The bulk of the book deals with the Yucatan and the Andes, where ruins continue to pop up. A relatively smaller portion is dedicated to North America, and much of that to the discoveries at a particular site in present-day Missouri (if I remember right -- I left the book with my sister in CA and can't go back to check). The book closes with a fairly editorial chapter, but it is brief and breezy, and concerns itself mainly with what social effects that contact with new cultures may have had on Europeans, and what a bummer it is that so many cultural legacies were lost.

On subjects like date(s) and route(s) of arrival to the Americas or estimates of pre-Colombian population size, the author interviews specialists with different viewpoints and presents them to the reader with a, "Who knows?" sort of attitude.

Leastways, that's the pose. I accept popular authors in fields that don't bear on my own because, frankly, I don't have the energy to plod through any more technical writing than I already have to.

I know exactly what you mean about Diamond, and that part of it disgusted me. That Diamond does have expertise, i do not doubt. That he has none in history, i also do not doubt. You've made Mann's work more interesting to me, though. I fully understand your response, too. I haven't the expertise to judge the relative merits of, for example, scientific claims. But i still want to keep up with "Science Times" in the New York Times, because the subjects interest me even if i lack the expertise.

I think metallurgyis the only thing which separated Europeans and Asians from Americans thousands of years ago. Eventually, a new factor entered into the equation, and that was the society which developed in western Europe after the collapse of Roman imperial authority there. (The Roman Empire itself continued until Constantinople fell to the Osmanli Turks in 1453, more than a thousand years later.) One problem that one encounters all the time in the study of history is the urge to adduce historical "laws" just as one has laws of physics or chemistry. J. B. Bury wrote "History is a science, no less and no more." (Bury was famous as an historian, especially of the late Roman Empire--usually called the Byzantine Empire--and of the "barbarian invasions" of Europe. Today, he is best remembered for a series of lectures on the "barbarian invasions" of Europe collected into a book.)

I could not agree less with Mr. Bury. About the only constant of history is human nature, and even small differences of detail of the environment in which human nature is expressed can make huge differences in the historical record. The temple societies of Mesopotamia were not at all like the temple societies of the Indus River valley, which were neither of them like the temple societies of the central Mexican plateau. The "feudalism" of Japan before and after the Sengoku period (mid-16th to early 17th century) is not at all like the feudalism of Europe. In fact, if anything is the culprit, feudalism in Europe and the manner of its collapse accounts for the societies of western Europe which were able to conquer globe girdling empires and hold them with a handful of troops in the face of millions of usually resentful subjects.

Diamond wants to provide a pat explanation for why Europeans "conquered the world," which will apply at all times and in all places. Sorry, Jared, it just won't work like that. History is not a science, and as a result, you have to study each era and each area. You have to study Japanese feudalism to understand its affect on Japan, because it is not like European feudalism, and knowing European feudalism will tell you nothing about Japan.

there are no longer any real dumps to scrounge. I remember one project that my company had been contracted to do. We had a landfill segment that was going to be dug and moved over top of a brand new liner system. SO as part of the design, one of my guyscontracted a dude from the U of Arizona who called himself a "garbologist". We excavated the landfill segment by segment and , instead of the materials rotting away, it turns out that a modern landfill actually preserves the whole pile due to the anaerobic conditions beneath. We used a large diameter auger (about 52 " in D) and, as we drilled down, every few feet, we would send a guy in level B and snap recovery ine to sample anything identifiable and with dates.
It was an interesting project and we published it in a SWANA journal . I forget the Az guys name but he was a prof at U of Az.

how did the strata differ?

a number of years ago we got some very nice and interesting bottles from an old dump site (lots of blue glass, we have them on widow ledges)

You surely wouldn't be good for you if a fat rabid rat or rabid raccoon bit your arm off.

In most neighborhoods in Cambridge and Boston, the night before trash pickup day is "furnish your apartment free" night, and a whole lot of people, not just the tens of thousands of students in the area, look to see what their neighbors have tossed that they can use (and sometimes feel guilty about carting it home while it's still light, but do it anyway). Got a nice midcentury modern Saarinen Womb chair and a great art deco chandelier that way.

And craigslist has a section of free stuff where people from all over the area post alerts of promising trash they've seen.

Though I do have to say I know a couple of the Boston Inspectional Services cops and they say some of the BU and BC student stuff is bedbuggy, which drives them crazy.

It doesn't occur to you just how supine a healthy adult male would have to be for a rat or a raccoon to bite his arm off? Do you think about what you've written before you post it?

PPD, i think Miller is suggesting that you don't go lie down at the dump and get paralytic drunk . . .

Still, there is a downside. You get a large number of people stomping around a jumble of unknown objects and unidentified substances, and somebody's going to get injured. The dump operator gets a big increase in liability rates, with no corrosponding increase in revenue.

AS I recall from all the data, there were lots of newspapers and paper bill headings. In the old part of the landfill there werent any "sell by" dates on food products. Thatwas a product of the 70's or later.

There was stuff from just after WWII and the "strata" were easily seen not as an even layer with oldest at the bottom, but the oldests stuff was deposited on an angle slope where the dump trucks would ride over the old **** and deposit new stuff sort of "over the edge". Then, after a time, the laws required that the fill area be compacted each day and covered with "daily cover"(dirt). The article we published was kind of silly but it was one of the first and was used as a chapter for the good profs book on trash.

My company was chosen because the site was an old strip mine that originally belonged to one of my clients.

When I was a kid, I remember plinking rats at the town dump west of Sinking SPrings Pa.

about a mil from me is an old community dump site that is located along the dep[osition bank of a stream. This dump has rotted all its putrescible **** and the only thing left are piles of dirt and ash and old bottles. A number of years ago a friend and I did an "Archeological grave robbing" of the dump site. WE found bottles with glass caps, old blue and purple glass and , of course, the most coveted color, RED GLASS. (It was used for specific and dangerous medications back in the 1800's). This dump went back to the early 1800's and maybe even earlier. We only got to about the middle area and we decided to save further exploration until some time laer. (We never returned and noone else seems to care)

We did some dump design. Well, first there was an architectural plan for the renovation of existing facilities, that by a well regarded out of area firm, and then we were brought in to see that some of the aspects were followed and to choose interior paint colors, design planting, and so on. We had a lot of fun, I tell ya..

It was the last dump I've been to personally, so it's fixed in my brain as the ultimate one. Anyway, trucks (or cars) would back up to the large covered dump area, and unload whatever to a space that I'd guess was 42" below grade, perhaps a bit more. None but the workers futzed around down there. However, the guy who ran the place, an artist himself, was savvy about recycling and I figure had some salvaging happening. The fence was made of salvaged items (not our doing, some contest), and our plant containers were old dump bins primed and painted in jolly color. Well, this was at a site that didn't get as hot as, say, Albuquerque does.

So, what, I guess I'd opt for wise ownership. Trouble would be that good observation of the materials and care to pick stuff out costs money to that owner. On the other hand, space is saved. I don't know the economics of it.

I do remember that about the time I left Los Angeles, everything was going to go into each home or building's large container, and it would all be sorted out on some conveyor belt.

I don't know how that worked out.

Adds, the dump for Brentwood, Bel Air, much of West LA, was in the Santa Monica mountains. I probably have an old polaroid of the trucks up there in action, went there with my dad and that was my camera du jour. I know the Getty isn't built on that (they lopped off a hilltop), but it was nearby. I think zillion dollar condos are over that dump now.

Myself, I'm vaccinated against rabies. There are a host of other agents I'd be concerned about, and more from the humus than from the critters.



Sounds perversely interesting to me.

My home town has a huge pit mine (gold) that's shut down after years of extraction and ruining neighboring wells. Talk of turning it into a dump -- not sure if that ever happened.

Would offer different strata over coming decades than those you saw from past decades, I'd guess.



We've got something of the sort here, too -- just to sort the recycling bins, or some such. Rumor is that if there's too much contamination of the bin with unusable refuse the whole lot will be tossed. Strictly hearsay, though.

Hey, wait, I didn't say that about a rat and so on, much less the later stuff. You have me confused with someone else.

Straighten up, dawg.

Sorry, osso, I does all the responses in a word pad out to the side, then paste it into a response. Should've "replied all," I s'pose.