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Taking their land · a chronological atlas of settlement and displacement
What this maps. The inclusion rule is documented land-taking or forced territorial removal, not migration alone. A qualifying case can involve settlement, conquest, demographic displacement, expulsion without replacement, or clearance for state or project use. This selected collection can reveal recurring combinations; it has no representative denominator of peaceful encounters and cannot establish universal inevitability or compare peoples' propensities. Held and excluded candidates remain in the research record with their reasons.
Historical process descriptions are not severity scores. How a case operated remains in its source-grounded prose and evidence record. This release does not promote a separate mechanism chip because the normalized mechanism vocabulary did not clear its independent reliability threshold. The reviewed primary analytical family and evidence-aware trait profile remain the public analytical summary; neither ranks suffering, moral wrong, or scholarly importance. Deep-history cases carry their evidentiary limits in the text rather than being forced into the vocabulary of a modern settler state.
Flight or refuge. Some incoming settlers were themselves fleeing war, persecution, or expulsion. Where established, a note beside the actors information identifies the cohort and links its sources. Flight can accompany other motives and state sponsorship; it does not determine the consequences for people at the destination. Ancient accounts retain their historical terms and uncertainties. These notes do not assign modern legal status or change the statistical profile. Coverage is incomplete: no note does not mean flight played no role. Download the notes and coverage statement.
The eight-trait profile. Numbers rescale ordinal coding judgments to 0–100; they are not percentages of people or confidence, nor ratio measurements. Solid bars summarize coded evidence; intervals and stripes show uncertainty. Qualitative findings have text-only verdicts, not full or empty bars. Unknown, not evidenced, zero, and not applicable are distinct. The six families are reviewed editorial groupings; the eight profiles are not the nine factors retained by the current statistical model. Durability reflects documented follow-up, not future permanence. Recent events have had less time to be observed. Public cards may include later source-reviewed corrections that await the next statistical release; the downloaded frozen release remains versioned and unchanged.
Marker colors retain legacy display groupings; they do not encode the six reviewed families or statistical scores. Read the case profile for the current family. The final map overlays authored connections across all dates, not current territorial control; route density is not event incidence, population volume, or severity.
Disputes are named, not smoothed over. Where the settler-colonial reading of a case is genuinely contested, as with Zionism before 1948, Xinjiang, West Papua, Tibet, Northern Cyprus, and the Sri Lankan dry zone, the panel says so and attributes the competing framings to the scholars and states that hold them, rather than splitting the difference into vagueness.
Numbers and sources. Figures are the ones historians actually defend, and where estimates diverge sharply the range is given rather than a false point value. Every case links its sources, weighted toward peer-reviewed scholarship, university presses, and primary institutional documents. Follow them. They are the argument, and the place to go next.
The map itself. The base map draws modern coastlines only, with no political borders of any era. Rivers, lakes, and the named ranges, deserts, and steppes fade in as the view closes, for orientation, and the oceans, seas, gulfs, and straits carry their names in italic over the water. They are today's physical geography from Natural Earth, simplified; several case-critical micro-islands use simplified OpenStreetMap coastline data, © OpenStreetMap contributors. The shaded relief regions are approximate areas rather than surveyed edges. These small gray and blue names are modern conveniences chosen only to help a viewer orient, never period claims, and they are curated. A name appears only where it fits its own feature at the current zoom, and a frame drops names that would mislead or crowd rather than orient. The sepia names that surface with each case are different. Those are the period names the case's own sources use. The markers locate the places named in the scholarship, not exact frontiers. Arrows show a documented direction of movement or the connection between an acting authority and the affected place; they do not encode migration volume or reproduce a literal route. Every origin and destination marker must visibly sit on land. When the Natural Earth layer omits or over-simplifies a small island, the atlas adds a restrained locator silhouette shaped and oriented like that island; only the connecting route may cross open water.
Names, not borders. While the atlas dwells on a case, the region names its own sources use surface on the land around it, Kemet and Kush, Rūm, Comanchería, the Pale, Te Waipounamu. A name spread over land says roughly where, and nothing more. Drawing period borders would invent hard lines the evidence cannot support, so the atlas names the land instead and lets the names change as the years pass.
Pacing and sound. Playback gives each case a brief viewing interval; pause for unlimited time to read its full account and evidence. The timeline compresses the deep past so ancient and modern cases both get room. Screen duration is not statistical weight. A low drone marks passing years and a short tone marks a new stop; sound encodes nothing about human cost.
Reuse this project. Original prose and graphics: CC BY-SA 4.0; structured research data: CC BY 4.0; original software: MIT. © 2026 Craig Talbert. Third-party code, map data, and quotations retain their own terms. Licenses, exceptions, and citation guidance.
Eight-trait profile + feedback build 20261004e-zanzibar-property · 533 event units · 543 playback stops
Direction and speed are the two groups beside Play. Each case has a stable link under Copy link.
Corrections and better sources are part of how this provisional atlas improves.