4-OCEANS: A Human History of Marine Life c.100 BCE to c.1860 CE 

The project team at the 4-OCEANS workshop Harvesting and Harrowing the Sea: Methodological Toolkits for Assessing Global Marine Extractions, hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, October 2023

4-OCEANS is a European Research Council Synergy Project that aims to assess the importance of marine life for human societies during the last two millennia, up to and beyond the age of fishing under steam-power. We contend that the harvest of marine resources played a critical, but as yet underappreciated and poorly understood, role in global history. To bridge this gap in our understanding, the project includes an interdisciplinary team combining expertise in historical archaeology, marine environmental history, climate history, natural history, geography, historical ecology, ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating and zooarchaeology. We will examine when and where marine exploitation was of significance to human society; how selected major socio-economic, cultural, and environmental forces variously constrained and enabled marine exploitation; and identify the consequences of marine resource exploitation for societal development and the oceans. Through these objectives we will discover how marine resources as novel wealth altered societies throughout history. How might marine wealth have enabled some societies to escape food shortages? How did it trigger long-term socio-economic impacts and ecological consequences? How were marine resources valued, consumed, and energetically transformed?  

The ten main taxa of the 4-OCEANS project: right whales, bowhead whales; sirenians, cod and related fishes (of the Atlantic and Pacific); walruses, fur seals (northern and southern), sea otters, parrotfish, herring (Atlantic and Pacific) and bluefin tuna (Atlantic and Pacific) 

Revealing the history of marine life will open a new window on human-nature dynamics of profound importance for understanding developmental trajectories of human societies. 4-OCEANS will transcend the binary distinctions of East and West, global-north and global-south, indigenous and colonial, resource exploitation and wildlife conservation, nature and culture. In so doing, 4-OCEANS will uncover and chart historical trajectories towards sustainable and unsustainable food security and resource extraction. Untangling human and natural drivers, we aim to explain how diverse historical trajectories created global networks, fuelling major centres with the products of distant ecosystems.

Before the industrial age, the four oceans exploited by humans were the Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic and the Atlantic, hence 4-OCEANS. It is also a project for the oceans. Our research aims to influence how academics, citizens and managers think about the consumption, value and future of marine life, about our shared ocean legacy and its sustainability.

The team is led by four principal investigators:

The ancient DNA strand is led by Bastiaan Star (Professor in the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, University of Oslo), and the radiocarbon dating by Bente Philippsen (director of the National Laboratory for Age Determination, NTNU).


This Google Site facilitates inter-university dissemination in an ERC Synergy Project bridging multiple institutions. For official institutional landing pages please visit: NTNU 4-OCEANS, UiO 4-OCEANS, TCD 4-OCEANS and NOVA 4-OCEANS.

Please contact james.barrett@ntnu.no for more information on the Norwegian components of the 4-OCEANS project