Pao Chao's cryptoforest

In about the year 459 Pao Chao wrote the "Wu-ch'eng fu", "rhapsody on a ruined city". The city is Kuang-Ling, modern day Yangchow, portrayed after its sacking. First it describes the city in its full splendour, then, after its fall ("divided like a melon, shared like beans") we are described scenes of the cryptoforested town. The Fu ends with the melancholy touch the western reader expect from Chinese poetry. The bit that interest me (coming from this PDF) is the portrayal of the city after nature has taken over. I think of this as a condensed version of Jefferies first chapter of After London.

Wet moss clings to the wells,
Wild vines entangle the paths.
The halls are arrayed with vipers and venomous beetles;
By the stairways deer and flying squirrels contend.
Wood sprites and mountain demons,
40 Field rats and wall foxes,
Howl in the wind, shriek in the rain,
Appear at dusk, flee at dawn.
Hungry hawks sharpen their beaks;
Winter kites hoot at young birds.
45 Crouching leopards, lurking tigers,
Suckle blood, sup on flesh.
Fallen thickets block the road;
Dark and desolate is the ancient highway.
White poplars early shed their leaves;
Wild grasses prematurely wither.
Bitter and biting is the frosty air;
Raging and roaring is the mighty wind.
A lone tumbleweed rolls by itself;
Blown sand flies of its own accord.
Dense bushes darkly stretch without end;
Thick copses wildly join one to another.
The surrounding moat already had been levelled;
The lofty turrets too have fallen.
Looking straight ahead for a thousand leagues and beyond,
All one sees is yellow dust rising.

There is another translation by Chen and Bullock that I find more to my taste because it names species and seems more ecological precise.

Duckweed flourishes in the wells
And brambles block the road.
Skunks and snakes dwell on sacred altars
While muskdeer and squirrels quarrel on marble steps.
In rain and wind,
Wood elves, mountain ghosts,
Wild rats and foxes
   Yawp and scream from dusk to dawn
Hungry hawks clash their beaks 
As cold owls frighten the chicks in their nests.
Tigers and leopards hide and wait
   for a draught of blood
   and a feast of flesh
Fallen tree-trunks lie lifelessly across
Those once busy highways.
Aspens have long ceased to rustle 
And grass dies yellow
In this harsh frosty air
Which grows into a cruelly cold wind.
A solitary reed shakes and twists,
And grains of sand, like startled birds,
   are looking for a safe place to settle.
Bushes and creepers, confused and tangled,
   seem to know no boundaries.
They pull down walls
And fill up moats.
And beyond a thousand miles
Only brown dust flies.

Novel tropical forests -> cryptoforestry

Ariel Lugo was one of the first to notice that second growth tropical forests invaded by exotic species were at least as efficient biodiverse as pristine forests. His 2009 paper 'The Emerging Era of Novel Tropical Forests' is only 3 pages but foundational. Here he describes the process from abandoned plantation to forest.

(1) The dominant tree species in the forests of Puerto Rico were mostly introduced species used by people for a variety of reasons.
 
(2) A diverse cohort of native tree species develops underneath the canopy of introduced species.
 
(3) Abandoned plantations of introduced species behaved like native forests and allowed the establishment of a rich understory of native species, which then mixed with the introduced species to form a different forest type than originally present.
 
(4) Experimental plantings of introduced species overcame arrested succession and native forest species reestablished below their canopy.
 
(5) Introduced tree species had the capacity to invade degraded lands while native pioneer species could not.
 
(6) Introduced tree species gained importance in island forests between 1982 and 2003.
 
(7) Introduced species were not randomly distributed on the landscape, but reflected past land uses, bioclimate, and substrate.
 
(8) Emerging forests had higher tree species richness than those that were native, and functioned as did native forests, but at different rates.

The entire paper is quotable but here is the conclusion:

Novel environmental conditions created by human activity favor the remixing of species and formation of novel forests. I expect novel forests to behave ecologically as native forests do, i.e., protect soil, cycle nutrients, support wildlife, store carbon, and maintaining watershed functions. Moreover, novel forests mitigate species extinctions as they, like secondary forests, are in successional paths to maturity and species accumulation. Nature’s response to the Homogeocene cannot continue to be ignored or remain undetected by ecologists. The dawn of the age of tropical novel forests is upon us and must not be ignored. 

Biodiversity in the Anthropocene

Following up on some links from an earlier post the following papers by Erle Ellis & various colleagues came up: 

1- Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world (2008, PDF)

2- Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000 (2010, PDF)

3- Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere (2011, PDF)

4- All Is Not Loss: Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene (2012, read this for a better understanding)

That's is a lot to take in. On one level the work is quantifying (with a lot of maps) "anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere". On another level it uses the data to make statements on the need for new conceptual categories of land use.

Between 1700 and 2000, the terrestrial biosphere made the critical transition from mostly wild to mostly anthropogenic, passing the 50% mark early in the 20th century. At present, and ever more in the future, the form and process of terrestrial ecosystems in most biomes will be predominantly anthropogenic, the product of land use and other direct human interactions with ecosystems. Ecological research and conservation efforts in all but a few biomes would benefit from a primary focus on the novel remnant, recovering and managed ecosystems embedded within used lands.

But it is not all bad news:

Anthropogenic global changes in biodiversity are generally portrayed in terms of massive native species losses or invasions caused by recent human disturbance. Yet these biodiversity changes and others caused directly by human populations and their use of land tend to co-occur as long-term biodiversity change processes in the Anthropocene. Here we explore contemporary anthropogenic global patterns in vascular plant species richness at regional landscape scales by combining spatially explicit models and estimates for native species loss together with gains in exotics caused by species invasions and the introduction of agricultural domesticates and ornamental exotic plants. The patterns thus derived confirm that while native losses are likely significant across at least half of Earth's ice-free land, model predictions indicate that plant species richness has increased overall in most regional landscapes, mostly because species invasions tend to exceed native losses. 

There is a tool:

Anthropogenic species richness (ASR) results when humans interact with native patterns of species richness. Within a given area, ASR can be quantified as the sum of native species richness (N), anthropogenic loss of native species (ASL) and anthropogenic species increase (ASI). 

And there is a philosophical point:

Anthropogenic biomes point to a necessary turnaround in ecological science and education, especially for North Americans. Beginning with the first mention of ecology in school, the biosphere has long been depicted as being composed of natural biomes, perpetuating an outdated view of the world as “natural ecosystems with humans disturbing them”. Although this model has long been challenged by ecologists, ... it remains the mainstream view. Anthropogenic biomes tell a completely different story, one of “human systems, with natural ecosystems embedded within them”. This is no minor change in the story we tell our children and each other. Yet it is necessary for sustainable management of the biosphere in the 21st century. Anthropogenic biomes clearly show the inextricable intermingling of human and natural systems almost everywhere on Earth’s terrestrial surface, demonstrating that interactions between these systems can no longer be avoided in any substantial way. Moreover, human interactions with ecosystems mediated through the atmosphere (eg climate change) are even more pervasive and are disproportionately altering the areas least impacted by humans directly (polar and arid lands).

And there are also catch phrases:

The big picture: all is change

All is not loss: sustaining biodiversity in anthromes
The anthropogenic melting pots

Anthropogenic succession: thinning globally, enriching locally

Ecologists go home!

Globalization creates forests [in some places]

Quoting from an interview between the Yale environmental website e360 and Susanna Hecht on the positive effect globalization has on the regrowth of forests in El Salvador:

With globalization and structural adjustment programs, things like corn and other basic staples were coming in at import prices that were below the cost of their production in El Salvador. That meant if you were going to sell your corn, you would be selling it at a loss. So peasant agriculture soon collapsed, allowing reforestation.

Another thing about globalization is that for niche commodities it’s quite good. Those are crops that get a premium. What it meant in the case of El Salvador is that things like cashews and coffee and artisanal products made from wood had a vigorous market compared to the crummy returns you got for corn and the milpa crops [Subsistence crops such as beans and squash.] There was a shift to higher value crops, many of them arboreal.

More than half the households receive remittances from various countries, mostly from family members in the Los Angeles area. People work at jobs here in the U.S. and send money back. If you are getting remittances, you live a lot better — it basically doubles your income. Instead of having to produce corn with low yields on, say, steep slopes, you could buy the corn for the tortillas and not have to go into these forest areas. The result was a lot of land abandonment. The land was allowed to go into successional activities or forest-based economies rather than being used for producing basically corn.

The global market is against agriculture and the farmers themselves receive so much money from relatives abroad that they can retire from farming anyway! This is happening in Europe as well as noted earlier. But a secondary forest is not the same as a primal forest and lots of people are worried that Hecht's work in the wrong hands can give a rational for the deforestation of old growth forests. Earlier we quoted David Quammen warning that the invasion of weedy species and the decline of local biodiversity creates unwanted international uniformity. Hecht responds to this in a way that with a bit of effort could still be interpreted as dismissing concerns over deforestation be positively addressing the biodiversity of second growth forests. I wonder if the second growth forests of El Salvador can be understood as novel ecosystems. 

I am always surprised how controversial this is. I think it’s partly because some conservationists don’t count secondary forest as real forest. They see forests as ahistorical and apolitical, and the forests just aren’t. It was pounded into people in Bio 101 that human interaction with forests is destructive. But there has been extensive human influence even in places like the Amazon. What my work there taught me is that these places weren’t empty, and that if you only look at the ecological side, you don’t see the social side of forests. The conservationists really don’t like this.

What helped me to see forests in degraded areas was being around people messing in the forest. So I was primed to see the El Salvador forests and not to disparage them. To me there is almost no primary forest; it’s all secondary forests. All landscapes will have to be working landscapes. If we have lots of people with forests, we should be thrilled. And we should be really thrilled when the forest comes back because we have a narrative that it doesn’t come back.

There has been a recognition that inhabited environments can have major conservation value. Even though the reforested areas are fragmented, they are quite diverse in terms of landscape. They end up actually having a rather interesting impact at regional levels — they scale up rather better than one might imagine. Even those hedgerows can provide something like 40 to 50 percent of the biodiversity that you get in a riparian system in El Salvador. And hedgerows, land demarcations, woodlots, gardens and domestic forests of various kinds all end up supporting biodiversity in ways that are kind of surprising. For instance, the bird diversity of El Salvador is about equal to that of Belize, which has a fraction of the population and far less fragmented forests.

The image comes from Hecht's paper 'Globalization and Forest Resurgence: Changes in Forest Cover in El Salvador'

Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation

"The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way -- a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America -- beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction -- We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer -- It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization -- the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation -- The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it -- But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds -- We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets -- We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade -- We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground -- In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number."

Jack Kerouac (in Esquire 1958)

The weeds in my street tabulated

A bit of infographic handicraft in Microsoft Paint! Click to Enlarge. Trusting I won't add to the weeds in my street in the few weeks of 2012 that remain us I have tried to get some sense out of the plants on the list by ordering all 38 of them according to their family and place of origin. There must be mistakes here, there and everywhere but this is as far as I have got this year. Next year will start again.  

With many thanks to all people who supported the survey by suggesting plant names. It was invaluable! 

Invasive species in NL

When rereading an old post on 'novel ecosystems' I wondered in what way statistics could illustrate the point of rapidly changing environments. The above graph shows the number of invasive vertebra, molluscs and lobsters. That the trend is toward acceleration is impossible to miss. I am looking for similar data on plants. There are an approximate 27.000 animal species in NL (2010 Data, graph on the right). The use of this is limited as presence of a specie and the frequency of a specie are two entirely different things.

   
The rising presence of invasive species happens against a decline in biodiversity: 

The 2005 'Audit of non-native species in England' has the following table on introduction dates for invasive species. It does not seem to show the same pattern from the Dutch data.

 

Internalising space from a distance

With much zeal but little talent (the instructor implied I was fat, it took me some time before I realized I was wearing my left shoe on the right foot and vice versa) I have taken up wall climbing a few months ago. 

These screenshots from Dutch TV program 'klokhuis' shows climbers at the Dutch championships lead climbing 'reading' the route to be climbed, a physical process that involves moving your hands into prospected future states (like reading with your finger) and projecting your body in imaginary positions. Internalising space from a distance. It happens that when I climb a route that looks new on the ground will suddenly come back to me when I am climbing it: my mind forgot it but my body remembers it. 

There is a lot of creativity in route building. Sometimes you encounter a route that seems to be built around one interesting move. But the best routes are internally consistent and clearly show the builder trying to achieve a certain effect. With time I am expecting to recognize the hand of the maker in each climb. 

Climbing a route is like taking an extremely intensive, condensed and abstracted city walk in an artificial landscape without views but with body-torquing-novelties and spectacular assemblages of jumps, turns, uncomfortable grips, deviations, distractions and sometimes a little redemption. 

My favourite part of climbing is when I hit a hard or confusing part of a new route and must then try to figure out where to go next, testing different approaches, moving a hand here or a foot there to decide what is the way forward. In reality this is probably bad practise, the best climbers I have seen move with slow (almost slow-motion) deliberation, clean, efficient and precise. Climbing has to do with creativity, learning and knowing place and all those other cliché's of psychogeography.  

When I began it never occurred to me that climbing is a sport (I was thinking of it more as something different to do with your body) and my body is being shocked out of decades of lethargy with lots of pain and suffering. Ouch.

The journal for the protection of all beings

"The journal for the protection of all beings" was published as the fall 1978 issue of Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quaterly. The Journal was edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McLure, Gary Snyder (all present at the Six Gallery poetry reading that launched the Beats to the world) and David Meltzer. This publication therefore connects 50 years of West Coast experimentation from beat and anarchist Buddhism to the merry pranksters and early internet happenings. "The journal for the protection of all beings" takes a US Buddhist long view of death and destruction, from the Atom bomb and plutonium fear to the mass extinctions of biological species and human cultures. It brings together a fascinating range of material, a liberal sprinkling of poetry (it all reads great and actually works in the context), positional essays and a few very nice bits about the subjectivity of (linguistic, anthropological) field work. It shows the Beats not as a bunch of Benzedrine fuelled hobo hitch-hikers but as a serious,engaged and inclusive group of people working towards a sustained and coherent non-ideological critique of civilization. The journal is a fascinating document that is well structured and builds up nicely with each new contribution, but, despite myself, I can't really love it. It suffers from an overdose of Buddhist zeal, those poets are self-converted choir boys for a alien faith. Maybe I am missing something that would add a little concreteness to the meta-meaning this journal is hoping to generate bottom-up. Still: it's a thing to cherish and the Gary Snyder essay on Chinese poetry is a brilliant piece that I had not read before and which alone was well worth the 8 dollar the thing cost me on Ebay.

Gramsci on 'the crisis'

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."  Antonio Gramsci

You know, what a great quote, I really feel great about quoting it, it makes me feel so, you know, cynically chic with a twist of visionary sparkle, shaken not stirred, the James Bond of the underclass. But those morbid symptoms are not morbid, they are the hopefully monsters preparing the way, exploring the world, learning the possibilities of unplanned freedoms. They are the vernacular and I distrust the imperial of both the 'old' and the 'new'.

The 2000 year old coppiced lime tree

Located in the Westonbirt Arboretum is a Lime tree that is over 2000 years old and that managed to reach its respectable age by a 25-year-coppice cycle. The picture above is all one tree. I Learned about this via Rob Penn's current BBC4 program Tales from the Wild Wood in which he takes under his care a neglected Welsh woodland. 

Plant circumnutation [plant growth trajectories with Mr Charles Darwin]

Cassia corymbosa: A, plant during day; B, same plant at night.

Charles Darwin is usually only known for his theoretical work (which arguable remain of some significance) but he was also an experimentalist who worked on barnacles and earthworms with meticulous care and for extended periods of time. Another subject he took on is the movement of plants. Below are trajectories of the circumnutation of various plants. Yes I needed to look that up as well: "cicumnation: The successive bowing or bending in different directions of the growing tip of the stem of many plants, especially seen in climbing plants." It looks neat though, like GPS tracks, and the accompanying explanations, like the following, add to the flavour. Who could have though that plants grow with such sense of exploration.

Brassica oleracea: circumnutation of radicle, traced on horizontal glass, from 9 A.M. Jan. 31st to 9 P.M. Feb. 2nd. Movement of bead at end of filament magnified about 40 times.

 Brassica oleracea: conjoint circumnutation of the hypocotyl and cotyledons during 10 hours 45 minutes. Figure here reduced to one-half original scale.

Pinus pinaster: circumnutation of young leaf, traced from 11.45 A.M. July 31st to 8.20 A.M. Aug. 4th. At 7 A.M. Aug. 2nd the pot was moved an inch to one side, so that the tracing consists of two figures. Apex of leaf 14 1/2 inches from the vertical glass, so movements much magnified.

Sida rhombifolia: circumnutation and nyctitropic (or sleep) movements of a leaf on a young plant, 9 1/2 inches high; filament fixed to midrib of nearly full-grown leaf, 2 3/8 inches in length; movement traced under a sky-light. Apex of leaf 5 5/8 inches from the vertical glass, so diagram not greatly enlarged.

Averrhoa bilimbi: angular movements of a leaflet during its evening descent, when going to sleep. Temp. 78° - 81° F.

Oxalis carnosa: movements of flower-peduncle, traced on a vertical glass: A, epinastic downward movement; B, circumnutation whilst depending vertically; C, subsequent upward movement, due to apogeotropism and hyponasty combined.

Three new drawings by my 4 1/2 year old

A man in a circus doing tricks

A little man inside the head of a crododile

A story about a monkey in a place far away from here [inspired by the Apenheul monkey zoo]

Elephant trails as the highway of the hunter-gatherer

Human migration as a kind of elephant tourism? Actual hard evidence is maybe a bit wanting but Gary Haynes makes an interesting suggestion on how (prehistoric) hunter-gatherer are aided in their exploration of their environment by the landscape management of several elephantine species in past and present times. Read his papers 'Mammoth landscapes: good country for hunter-gatherers' and 'Elephant landscapes: human foragers in mammoths, mastodonts, and elephants'. For elephant trails as desire trails see earlier.

Studies of elephants in the wild show clearly that proboscideans make complex mental maps of water points, mineral sources, forage patches, fruit trees, travel routes, and socializing sites. My own studies confirm that travel routes between these important places can be effortlessly found by human foragers and other animal taxa. Proboscidean trails are well used, clearly identifiable, and easy to follow. They tend to be flat surfaced (because elephants have flat feet and great weight which compresses the ground so much), measure about 45 cm wide or more, and are consistently placed year to year. Human hunters or scavengers would have recognized these trails, read the signs to be found on them, and made use of them to track and follow vulnerable animals moving from water source to forage to cover to mineral licks and back again.

The modern literature on African and Asian elephants shows that they frequently move long distances, exploring for new forage, new mates, or new ranges. Proboscideans also habitually re-use old trails seasonally or more often, thus establishing clear networks of widely separated places connected by paths. Such networks of fixed and dependable trails would provide a means to encourage exploratory mobility by human pioneers into new ranges.

Mineral pit dug by elephants

Pointing you to an important paper on edible wild plants

"lacto-fermented hogweed soup (+eggs): the original borscht"

Nancy Turner and six co-authors wrote "Edible and Tended Wild Plants, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Agroecology" a very readable look on the possible importance of weedy plants for food. It's hard to summarize the paper because there are no words wasted but if you are interested in the wider implications of foraging I advice you to read it. The crux of the matter is stated here:

Wild plant species, even for agrarian peoples or pastoralists who mainly used animal products, would have assumed a special importance during times of crop failure and famine. Some of these are the species that we know of today as “weeds”: species well adapted to disturbed conditions and often associatedwith human habitation. In turn, some of these weeds became the candidates for domestication: for example, mustards, wild carrot, chicory and lettuce. Altogether, widely used domesticated species comprise only a fraction of the 20,000 or so plant species known to have been used as food by humans. Canadian Indigenous peoples alone have used over 500 species of plants for food. In recent times, however, especially in urban areas of the world, most people have come to depend on fewer and fewer species to provide them with their daily nutrition. Today, only around 20 domesticated species supply up to 85% of the world’s food base.

What follows then is a ten page overview of selected edible wild plants from around the world as documented in scientific literature. That's an approximate 250 plants, way more than an average forage guidebooks will give you. The paper continues with various strategies for wild plant use and management before giving a very good definition of weeds, their downsides and upsides. It then continues by giving various examples of weeds used in local cuisines. I am quoting from the paragraph on Borsch:

Nowadays the Russian name borsh and Polish barszcz designate a kind of vegetable soup, specifically one made with beetroots (Beta vulgaris). However in the past this name applied mainly to a soup made from the young shoots of hogweed, or cow-parsnip (Heracleum sphondylium) which in Polish bears the name barszcz and in Russian barshchevnikh. How did it happen that this shift in the meaning of the name arose? This issue fascinated professor Jozef Rostafinski, a Polish botanist from Cracow, who in 1916 published a treatise on the history of the shift from eating Heracleum to eating beetroots. Hogweed is reported as an important food plant in Poland in the sixteenth century. In the herbal of Marcin z Urze¸dowa (1595) we can read: “Whoever eats hogweed, moistens his living.. . . When they make it sour in the Polish way, it is good to drink in fevers, thirst, as it alleviates thirst and cholera and it induces greed for food with its spice.. . . Garnished with egg and butter, it is good to eat on the days when they do not eat meat soup, as it works in the same way.”

Isn't that lovely? The paper ends with the observation that the traditional knowledge of gathering wild plants is mostly down to old women whose skills are not being handed down to a new generation. And this is a shame because with it we lose a local, practical, hands-on knowledge that appreciates diversity and gives independence and understanding of the environment to its practitioners.

Strange Berlin 2nd hand bookshop grid map

In a TV documentary on Hendrik Lenstra, the Dutch mathematician, the man travels to Berlin to deliver the Euler lecture. His main concern in Berlin however seems to be to visit as many 2nd hand bookshops he can (he collects old book because they smell better than modern ones). He prepares his visit carefully by plotting shops on a map to find those hotshots where there are several shops in close proximity. They way he does this puzzles me though. As a mere mortal I would find all shops on a topographic map. Lenstra has a different technique: he creates a grid matching the Letters and Numbers from the map register (shop one in E13, shop two in F8 and so on) and then draws lines to connect the E and 13. The result, to me, looks a bit confusing.

Crannog Cryptoforestry

Crannog, Neolithic artificial island, found splattered across Ireland and Scotland in their hundreds. There is one in Wales too. Cryptoforests 1000 years after. Had prepared a post in which each picture had a source and a location, but Blogger ate the post and I can't be motivated to do it again. Therefore a quick roll call of sources: Scotland Places, Wikipedia, Graymonk, Education and Inchigeelach.

Humanized monkey and wild Indians

From Gregor's book on Xingu's Mehinaku people (earlier); one image shows a humanized capuchin monkey and the other a Golemized wild Carib Indian. The wild Indian still appears more human than the monkey, but just barely.

Amazonian garden dissected

In Charles C. Mann's '1493' (earlier) we find this glossed picture of an Amazonian garden in N.E. Brazil. It shows the detailed and intricate knowledge behind a good garden. 

Mehinaku cartography [mapping the Xingu]

The Mehinaku are an indigenous Amazonian  people living in Xingu park. In his 1977 book 'The Mehinaku: The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village' Thomas Gregor writes about them as if they were actors acting out their part. If life is a performance the village is a stage: "The Mehinaku village and its environs are a theatre for the enactment of everyday social relationships... The layout of the village and the architecture of the houses are simultaneously a spatial representation of Mehinaku social organization and a traffic pattern for the flow of information and interaction." If you say so! The images gives us something of everything: the village as a allusion to the cosmos, the mental map, the cognitive map, a cartoon and an areal picture.  We are always happy when can store up on some more ethnocartographic imagery. Click to Enlarge.  

"A Mehinaku view of everyday village life. When Amairi painted this he occasionally stopped to chuckle over his characterization of a particular villager."