River of Darkness by Buddy Levy

Author:Buddy Levy [Levy, Buddy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, History, Expeditions & Discoveries, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Latin America
ISBN: 9780553908107
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2011-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

* The mouth of the Madeira, at its confluence with the Amazon, is more than five hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean.

* Historian Antonio de Herrera says that this chief’s name was Caripuna, and Father Cristóbal de Acuña, who spent nearly two years on the Amazon, mentions a tribe by that name on the Madeira River. They were observed later, in 1852, by Lieutenant Gibbon, U.S.N., near the falls of the Madeira River.

† According to Helaine Silverman and William Isbell, “some advanced Amazonian societies built impressive formal roads, causeways, and canals of monumental scale. Large and small sites in the Tapajos … regions [Orellana and Carvajal report] are connected by traces of networks of straight roads with earthen berms suggesting hierarchical socio-political organization at a regional scale.” Silverman and Isbell, Handbook of South American Archaeology, 172–74.

* A defensive protection in the form of a breastplate.

* Once thought naturally occurring, terra preta (and the lighter-in-color terra mulata) is now widely accepted as intentionally man-made, improved soil, the culmination of what is referred to as “slash-and-char” agriculture. In slash-and-char, the organic matter is burned incompletely, resulting in charcoal rather than ash. Due to the high charcoal content and other nutrients—imbued into the soil as a result of intentional burning and then turned into the ground along with long-accumulated organic domestic rubbish such as excrement, fish, turtles, and even animal bones—terra preta contains much more calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur than typical Amazonian rain forest red earth soils, giving it longer-lasting fertility. Terra preta is also characterized by large quantities of potsherds in the soil, signifying human habitation and influence. See Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 306–10.

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