Farming The World

Terra 4 is a world of seascapes. The globe is rapidly settled by purposeful voyages and island hopping that now reaches into all parts of the uninhabited oceans. The remote is turned into the local, and maritime neighbourhoods are created out of materials shared over great distances. The impact of these dispersals can be traced through the Pacific and across the Indian and Atlantic oceans (Figure 8.1).

Terra 4 is also a world of complex political landscapes. In conjunction with the settlement of seascapes, Terra 4 contains evidence from human biology, genetics, linguistics, texts and artefacts for repeated population displacement throughout the lands settled in Terra 3. These displacements have been the engine driving our interest in shallow history (Box 1.1, Table 2.3). They provide an understanding of the past that both supports and challenges current national identities and universal notions of humanity. These multifarious displacements are fuelled by ever-more complex societies extracting more from the land and growing larger in size (Table 3.8b).