Flex Mentallo

I know if any emergency whom I can get immediately and instantly beside me will be without any hesitation 'you'. Thank you for calling it your family. Everyone in your family knows how much you love them and they always admit it. I will ask liza to check her account after a week. I have told her to keep it for emergency. I want she don't go back to that hell. She should become an independent girl. They will just kill her. And above all where she will go the boy is not ready to accept her as a wife and his family blame liza for everything. They do every type of torture they could. My family still wants she should try to go back. She should ask them for one chance. But I know she can not withstand what will happen to her. Her in-laws are inhuman. They are against everything she do. They even do not allow her to stay in his bedroom alone. The bad thing they did they planned and made her pregnant. I was against having the baby from beginning but no one listened to me and They made her suffer. I cant resist all these and cant do anything. You please take care of your health. Take my love. Lucina Yeasmin

I have just sent Rs 5000 to Lija as requested. Please ask her to keep any surplus for emergencies only. And please tell her I have sent it with love. Let me know when it reaches - I think it may take a week. They may also deduct a fee at her end. Give everyone my love. If anyone else in our family needs money for good reason in future of course I am here to help. You will be the judge of it. (That includes you dear if god forbid something major or very urgent comes up!) I am starting to put a little aside each month and it is no hardship. Actually the reverse - this helps me to feel connected. All my love Michael

I want she don't go back to that hell Just a brief interlude to update those who are interested on Lija's situation. I hope you wont mind if I share? (Though you may find it upsetting.) Bulbuli's baby was sick and admitted to the hospital last saturday. She was released by the hospital on Wednesday. she is quite well now. Yes I think this is gong to be tough to support her. Because there is a huge responsibility. I have told her to join a computer class and continue her education so that she can take her baby's responsibility on herself. You send her money little by little so that she only can use it for her study purpose. Other wise she will spend it on her family. For getting Computer education she will immediately need 2500- 3000 rupees. send her maximum 5000 rs. I am sending her account details.If anything requires tell me I will try to send. I told her not to discuss it with anyone so that she can spent it for her own education only. Take my love Lucina Yeasmin

It's not for me but I reckon that book has plenty of room to go further. And further still. Better tighten your belt Rick!

as well you should be! big congrats, buddy. Chris, I can just picture you right now with a smile to outshine even Billy's! Congratulations buddy!

Great photo and fascinating stuff. Thanks John, I think these photos of Caral are awe inspiring and couldn't resist "shoehorning" them into the narrative at this point. Had the civilisation in the Amazon had the resources to build in stone rather than wood, our understanding of their past would have been radically different. Instead of monuments we have aerial photos, terra preta, rituals in small villages that belong in larger communities, and recently, ancient middens (large mounds of broken potsherds) scattered along the banks of the Amazon. We thought of Orellano as a charlatan and Fawcett as a reckless dreamer with ill-found notions. We thought of El Dorado as a myth. For me the truly compelling part is how a lost reality became a myth, and myth became reality again, transforming our understanding in so many profound ways. Next: Was God an Astronaut?

And what of the surviving tribes who are the scattered remnants of this lost civilization? Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Amazonian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders. "No one knows for sure who they are, where they are, how many they are, and what languages they speak." Sydney Possuelo

Orellano reported that the indigenous people used fire to clear their fields. Bruno Glaser, from the University of Bayreuth, has found that terra preta is rich in charcoal, incompletely burnt wood. He believes it acts to hold the nutrients in the soil and sustain its fertility from year to year. This is the great secret of the early Amazonians: how to nurture the soil towards lasting productivity. In experimental plots, adding a combination of charcoal and fertiliser into the rainforest soil boosted yields by 880% compared with fertiliser alone. Yet terra preta may have a still more remarkable ability. Almost as if alive, it appears to reproduce. Bill Woods has met local farmers who mine the soil commercially. They find that, as long as 20cm of terra preta is left undisturbed, the bed will regenerate over a period of about 20 years. He suspects that a combination of bacteria and fungi is causing this effect. Today, scientists are busy searching for the biological cocktail that makes barren earth productive. If they can succeed in recreating the Amerindians' terra preta, then a legacy more precious than the gold the Conquistadors sought could spare the rainforest from destruction and help feed people across the developing world.

And by the time the Amazon Basin was first being populated, it was because the civilisation that did so had discovered the secret of terra preta.

The finding is forcing a re-evaluation of ideas about the rise of the earliest civilizations in the New World, particularly how and when ancient peoples moved from the coasts, with reliable ocean food sources, to inland settlements with less stable supplies of food.

New radiocarbon dating shows that Caral flourished for five centuries, starting about 2600 B.C., with public architecture (including six stone platform mounds up to 60 feet high), ceremonial plazas and irrigation -- all signs of a society with strong, centralized leadership.

The oldest city in the Americas flourished at the same time that the pyramids were being built in Egypt. The vast site, called Caral, had a complex, highly structured society that is one of about a dozen large sites in the Supe Valley, just inland from the Pacific coast in central Peru, 120 miles north of Lima.

Caral

It's interesting, having been to Chichen Itza and some of the other Mayan ruins in the Yucatan, how similar that depiction is. In this case, the illo was the closest I could find to resonate with Orellano's "Cities of shining white in the jungle". But those cities would have been made of wood and piled earth, not stone, which is why they disappeared into the jungle soon after they were abandoned. (There is a similar problem for archaeologists in India, where temples were constructed out of wood until a few thousand years ago, leaving no trace. We only know they existed because the first stone temple builders literally carved fake wooden rafters in the ceilings!) I'd honestly expected to come upon one or two accurate artist's impressions of what Orellano described - I did a lot of searching, but no luck so far.

For centuries, our view of the Amazon has assumed that the indigenous peoples were isolated tribes of hunter gatherers who had journeyed East across the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, carrying the same shamanistic traditions still found among the surviving indigenous peoples of North America. They are the remnants of a continent spanning civilisation that flourished in the Amazon jungle at the same time as the Roman Empire, and may well have been larger and more populous. But it is now known that there were cities in South America thousands of years before Rome. Next: Caral

The survivors melted into the jungles to escape the successive waves of conquistadors and missionaries. But evidence remains of past greatness in their rituals.For instance the semi-nomadic descendants of the Omagua, Umana, and Cambeba tribes (all of whom speak the Omagua language) are distinguished by having a hereditary, yet landless, aristocracy, a historical anomaly for a society without a sedentary, agrarian culture. Indeed in some villages, fully half the tribe are "royalty", with the right to wear certain costumes and perform tribal dances and rituals, while the other half stand and watch.

So what happened to the Xingu and the Omaguas? Both survive, though the Omaguas population is now very small. What was the nature of Orellano's illness? It may be that he carried measles or smallpox to the region, to which the local populace would have had no resistance. Their structures, made of wood, would have been rapidly swallowed up by the jungle once deserted.

It is known as terra preta, literally "black earth". And it turns out that it does have the properties claimed for it and was made by adding a mixture of charcoal, bone, and manure - sufficiently fertile to support the large populations described by Orellana.

Archaeologists had long believed that the jungle soil was too poor to support agriculture. Even as evidence of the garden cities were coming to light, reports began to emerge of a magical soil that was being mined and sold to small farmers on the fringes of the Amazon basin. This soil was said to have extraordinary, transformative properties. And it appears that it is virtually immortal.

Long ago, Ebenezer Howard proposed a model for lower-density urban development, a “garden city,” designed to promote sustainable urban growth .The model proposed networks of small and wellplanned towns, a “green belt” of agricultural and forest land, and a subtle gradient between urban and rural areas. The pre-Columbian polities of the Upper Xingu developed such a system, uniquely adapted to the forested environments of the southern Amazon.

"In pre-Columbian villages, we can expect that the landscape was much more densely occupied and used more intensively and according to more rigidly defined divisions and schedules. Where today (2006) there are three villages of about 500 people (with only one of 350 a decade earlier), there were over 20 settlements in at least two clusters, with the larger first-order settlements ranging over 10 times the residential area of the modern Kuikuro village. These multi-centric settlement hierarchies encompass a small territory of about 400 km2. It is hard to say what the exact scale of communities or regional populations was, but the size and configuration of the settlements themselves is quite clear. Plaza villages, like today, were critical social nodes and tied into elaborate socio-political networks. Primary roads and bridges are oriented to plazas, or more accurately, are ordered by the same spatial principles, which also order domestic and public space, creating a cartography and landscape that was highly partitioned and rigidly organized according to the layouts of settlements and roads." Michael Heckenberger

The findings follow separate discoveries further south, in the Xingu region, of interconnected villages known as "garden cities". Dating between 800 and 1600, they included houses, moats and palisades.One of these, a civilisation called Kuhikugu, may have actually existed near where Percy Fawcett was looking, as discovered recently by archaeologist Michael Heckenberger and others.

The structures were created by a network of trenches about 36ft wide and several feet deep, lined by banks up to 3ft high. Some were ringed by low mounds containing ceramics, charcoal and stone tools. It is thought they could have maintained a population of 60,000 – more people than in many medieval European cities.The feat, requiring sophisticated engineering, canals and roads, rivals Egypt's pyramids.

Garden Cities of the Xingu Long after Percy Fawcett had been forgotten, satellite imagery and fly-overs revealed more than 200 huge geometric earthworks carved in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia. Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD. An estimated 2,000 structures remain hidden beneath the jungle canopy, vestiges of vanished societies. The structures point to a "sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society", says the journal Antiquity. which has published the research.

For the remainder of the twentieth century, El Dorado was consigned to the same category as crackpots and conspiracy theorists...