Environmental History of Soils - The Basic Environmental History - page 92

of engineering works for terraces and similarly treated elds. Nutrient recycling

techniques for cereal as well as for specialized types of cultivation such as seri-
culture (by using silkworm excrement as fertilizer) are highly developed in the
manuals. Although we know much less about the practice of the Ancient Chinese,
we do know that in their world-view soils held a special place. The Chinese are the
only agricultural people who worshipped the soil as such, not in the form of fertility
deities, but the material as it was. The soil cult did not prevent erosion, which
occurred time and again over the long course of Chinese history, often as a side-
effect of agricultural expansion. The altar of the Earth and Harvests in Sun Yat-sen
Park in Bejing, however, which was used from the 14th century CE onwards is an
architectural testimony to concern about soils.
There might still be reverence paid to soils on village altars today, but the picture
Lindert 37 and others paint of current trends in erosion, pollution and other types of
soil degradation is not positive. As scholars like James Reardon Anderson have
pointed out, many of the trends which were enhanced in communist, industrial
China and are now continuing, have been started in the late 18th and 19th centuries,
when China expanded agriculture to lands that had formerly been pasture or for-
est. 38 Due to large-scale interventions China has lost much of its forest cover,
leading to increased runoff and erosion. Industrialization has taken its toll in terms
of heavily polluted soils un

t for cultivation. With changing dietary habits,
increasing population and extremely fast industrialization, the pressure on China ' s
soils is likely to increase in the coming decades.

3.3.2.2 Mesoamerica

It is pretty clear from archeological evidence that humid tropical lowlands were the
major settings for the origin and development of agricultural systems in Meso-
america. Maize and manioc cultivation were the drivers for the diffusion of swidden
agriculture from 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, giving the region a long history of
cultivation, and thus, of interaction with soils. Beach, Luzzader-Beach and Dunning
have detailed the history of soils in the area in an overview article. 39
Our knowledge in terms of classi cation, testing and amending is much more

scarce for the Americas than for China. This is due in part to destruction of many
written sources by the conquering Europeans. The few extant sources are not
manuals about agriculture but basically survey texts and maps with glyphs denoting
soil quality. Nevertheless, Barbara Williams has been able to reconstruct Aztec soil
knowledge in some detail, which is the best documented of the entire continent. 40
The classi cation in the Codice de Santa Maria de Asunci ó n shows 104 variants for

37 Lindert ( 2000a ).
38 Reardon-Anderson ( 2005 ).
39 Beach et al. ( 2006 ).
40 Williams ( 2006 ).