ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the questions in the Bengal Delta of South Asia and the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. When Europeans arrived on intricate coast with ambitions for settlement, they brought with them the idea of a coastline. The choice of the moment of flow formation is significant. In the moment of rain, land use can be infused with an appreciation of section, direction, and time, such that occupancies on high ground can extend opportunistically and temporally to low ground; and those on low ground can extend in the same way to high ground. The design of fingers of high ground drives us to rework the way we understand "land use," which is typically seen in terms of exclusive areas of the earth surface. Settlement in a rain terrain such as the Ganga does not occur on land across a line from water. It rather occurs on the slopes of janapadas, a word that translates as "footholds".