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Global Terra Preta: Asian Dark Earths

Asian Dark Earths: Paddy Anthrosols, Terra Mulata Analogues, and Human-Made Soils What if long-term soil fertility didn’t depend on a single technological trick, but on multiple pathways shaped by ecology, culture, and management? This presentation explores Asian Dark Earths—a broad class of anthropogenic soils formed through millennia of sustained human land use across East and Southeast Asia. Moving beyond the Amazon-centric focus on terra preta and Amazonian Dark Earths, this talk examines how Asian societies engineered fertile soils through fundamentally different mechanisms. We begin with Chinese paddy Anthrosols, one of the largest and longest-lived anthropogenic soil systems on Earth. These flooded rice soils demonstrate a hydrologically mediated pathway to soil persistence, where redox cycling, anaerobic carbon stabilization, and institutionalized water management maintain fertility over thousands of years—without reliance on high charcoal inputs. The discussion then shifts to terra mulata–like soils in Southeast Asia, including long-used cultivation and swidden–fallow systems in Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Borneo. These soils reflect distributed, low-intensity anthropogenic modification, driven by repeated biomass inputs, controlled burning, organic matter cycling, and landscape reuse within forest–agriculture mosaics. Fertility emerges through aggregation, nutrient retention, and microbial turnover rather than deliberate biochar engineering. Additional Asian examples—including Korean tidal Anthrosols and Japanese kuroboku-influenced systems—highlight how human management can amplify hydrological or mineralogical controls to produce persistent soil fertility under very different environmental constraints. Taken together, Asian Dark Earths expand the global framework of anthropogenic soils and challenge simplified narratives within regenerative agriculture. They show that durable soil improvement can arise through hydrological control, distributed cultivation, or low-intensity management, provided practices align with underlying biogeochemical systems. This talk is part of a broader investigation into: Anthropogenic soils Terra preta and terra mulata Amazonian Dark Earths (comparative context) Paddy Anthrosols Regenerative agriculture (historical and ecological limits) Soil carbon stabilization pathways Human–soil co-evolution Presented by Craig Hartsough (2026)