[mapotofu]

> During their excavations, the scientists also found several artifacts, including charcoal and fragments of broken ceramics. These discoveries suggest that the area’s Indigenous farmers may have dumped their household waste and the remnants of fires onto their fields, using them as compost. Samples taken from the mounds suggest the farmers enriched the dirt with soil from nearby wetlands.

Exciting - that sounds a lot like Terra preta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

No doubt this practice was used widely across the Americas. The natives were tremendously skilled with plants. This is another step to uncovering some of the knowledge lost. I hope they can find more of these same features.

[politelemon]

I wouldn't have imagined broken pottery could serve as compost, how is that made possible? It's clay but it retains some properties even after baking?

[brookst]

Pottery of the time was low-fired and did not generally reach vitrification, and it was not glazed with a silica-based glaze that would seal it.

So over time this pottery would absorb water. And especially low-fired bits could totally break down.

Source: amateur ceramicist, and I have first-hand experience with cone 6 clay (vitrifies at 1200c) bisc-fired to cone 04 (1060c) and crumbling to bits when left in water too long.

[ruined]

to add some context, in modern gardening things like crushed vermiculite are a common soil amendment. being a porous absorbent mineral, it serves the same purpose.

[chongli]

Not to mention terracotta is a very common material for potted houseplants and container gardening. Terracotta is low-fired, non-vitreous and porous to water, giving it nice breathability and water absorption characteristics.

There are also long-necked terracotta bottles (called ollas) you can buy (or DIY) which you bury in the ground. You fill the bottle with water and the terracotta itself acts as a wick, providing a slow release continuous underground water source for plants to access.

[duxup]

I have some reproduction native American pottery from the upper great plains. They're pretty neat as they have round bottoms. Just holding it feels like given enough time it would break down and melt for sure. It feels very porous.

[hinkley]

There’s a type of low fired clay used in bonsai soil and a harder one used in hydroponics. Good for retaining moisture and they don’t swell and shrink with water.

[politelemon]

Thanks this was educational for me.

[999900000999]

If you were in the woods( pick a spot) and had whatever food/medicines you needed could you build pottery from scratch.

Electricity is fine and all, but I imagine the basics of civilization could be replicated by a few good craftsmen(people)

[hinkley]

Primitive Technology on YouTube does this repeatedly.

You make a hole or find a piece of slate for processing, you mine clay from a stream bed, and then you make your first pot as a tool for moving water, the second pot for making food, and before or after the second pot you make clay bricks to build a kiln to high fire other things more efficiently - less fuel and more multitasking of other tasks.

[WalterBright]

Why don't contestants on "Alone" do this?

[hinkley]

This question is substantially why I stopped watching that show.

I think at least a few of them may have trouble locating pure clay where they are dropped but not all of them, every season, for years.

[sologoub]

If you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that’s more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don’t want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards where they seemingly don’t belong.

[pfdietz]

I was also going to say, earthworms will slowly bury objects (Darwin wrote on this), but that region didn't have earthworms at the time.

[bastawhiz]

TIL that earthworms in the American northeast are largely invasive species. That's very surprising to me

[7thaccount]

Are they problematic though? There were earthworms there before the ice age I think.

[andy99]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North...

Also learning about this today. Apparently they're bad for ecosystems that had evolved with slowly decaying organic matter (because they eat it all quickly). In particular forests.

At least in my education they have always been framed as a vital component of the ecosystem and a sign of healthy soil. It's interesting to learn that's not true.

[maxerickson]

There's invasive species that are hugely problematic, converting whole forests from fungal decomposition of leaves to bacterial (changing the soil conditions quite a lot).

[edmundsauto]

I have thought about this and figured it was more mechanical (ie drainage) than chemical (nutrients).

[fhk]

Yes very established in Hydro and Aquaponics

Clay pellets / balls

[mapt]

A lot of these observations about the miraculous soil caretaking of the elder Native Americans are in all likelihood just "Look at this garbage dump, so fertile, such agricultural skill!"

Broken half-fired terra cotta is effectively unusable rock. Terra cotta is semi-disposable, so lots of potsherds are produced per person-year before plastics/glasses/metals are introduced. It's the single most common and best-preserved archeological artifact. Broken pottery was used in place of sand to stabilize the clay in new pottery, but other than that it doesn't have many special qualities.

[natmaka]

Clay regulates various elements in the water (too much: they adsorb some, not enough: they release), enhances drainage...

Some species of bacteria needed for the vital nitrogen-cycle thrive inside clay.

That's the reason why clay balls/pebbles/pellets are omnipresent in many types of plant cultivation projects.

[mapotofu]

If you added the pottery fragments to the compost pile they would be “baked” again, albeit in a very different environment, and the finished product would have structural diversity closer to soil. Normally that would be rocks, but if your goal is to grow food clay rocks might be better for many reasons.

[maxerickson]

It could just be incidental, some broken pottery unintentionally mixed into fire ash that was intentionally spread on a field.

[sublinear]

Just a wild guess here, but isn't all kinds of stuff usually added to soil to help regulate moisture and pH levels?

[pfdietz]

Clay also acts to retain positive ions, since the surfaces of clay particles have negative charges.

[sfjailbird]

You're all overthinking it. They dumped their kitchen waste in the fields, and it happened to contain broken pottery too. It's the same for other archeological sites all over, many are waste dumps that contain interesting objects.

[MangoToupe]

How would you characterize this distinction? It sounds like you're simply describing the same behavior.

[pfannkuchen]

Intentional vs incidental?

[MangoToupe]

Does this matter? That is extremely difficult to differentiate via the archaeological record, so most archaeological research simply abandons the distinction. You should essentially never read intention into archaeology unless someone makes an extremely strong case the alternatives might be firmly excluded. As an example for a strong case of intention: if you find twenty skulls with pickaxes in their heads lined up on a shelf in an underground cubicular room, you should probably not assume this is a coincidence.

If you're reading about the use of pottery in soil, it does not matter what the people intended—at least, not as a primary concern. It is easy to read intention into headlines though.

[robertlagrant]

This is the intention the previous poster was countering:

> These discoveries suggest that the area’s Indigenous farmers may have dumped their household waste and the remnants of fires onto their fields, using them as compost

[p1mrx]

They probably couldn't be bothered to sort trash and compost into separate bins.

[mc32]

Until further evidence is found it’s premature to say that there is no doubt that it was widely used in the Americas. I think there is doubt though that could be removed with more evidence.