Agricultural Strategies


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Series: Cotsen Advanced Seminar 2
ISBN: 978-1-931745-22-2
Publication Date: May 2006
Price: Hb $49.95, Pb $24.95, Eb $24.95
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Joyce Marcus & Charles Stanish

This volume brings together a diverse set of new studies--archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic—that focus on agricultural intensification and hydraulic systems around the world. Fifteen chapters—written by many of the world's leading experts—combine extensive regional overviews of agricultural histories with in-depth case studies. In this volume are chapters on agriculture in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, Oceania, Mesoamerica, and South America. A wide range of theoretical perspectives and approaches are used to provide a framework for agricultural land-use and water management in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. This book covers the co-evolutionary relationships among sociopolitical structure, agriculture, land-use, and water control. Agricultural Strategies is an invaluable resource for those engaged in ongoing debates about the role of intensification and agriculture in the past and present.

Agricultural Strategies
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction by Joyce Marcus and Charles Stanish
MIDDLE EAST
Chapter 2. Intensified Large-Scale Irrigation as an Aspect of Imperial Policy: Strategies of Statecraft on the Late Sasanian Mesopotamian Plain by Robert McC. Adams
Chapter 3. From Highland to Desert: The Organization of Landscape and Irrigation in Southern Arabia by Tony Wilkinson
SOUTH ASIA
Chapter 4. Intensification as Situated Process: Landscape History and Collapse by Kathleen Morrison
Chapter 5. Water Supply, Labor Organization, and Land Ownership in Indus Floodplain Agricultural Systems by Heather M.-L. Miller
EUROPE
Chapter 6. The Barren and the Fertile: Central and Local Intensification Strategies across Variable Landscapes by Tina L. Thurston
Chapter 7. Irrigation in Medieval Spain: A Personal Narrative across a Generation by Thomas F. Glick
OCEANIA
Chapter 8. Agricultural Intensification: A Polynesian Perspective by Patrick V. Kirch
MESOAMERICA
Chapter 9. The Roles of Ritual and Technology in Mesoamerican Water Management by Joyce Marcus
Chapter 10. The Economic Underpinnings of Prehispanic Zapotec Civilization: Small-Scale Production, Economic Interdependence, and Market Exchange by Gary M. Feinman
Chapter 11. Agricultural Intensification, Water, and Political Power in the Southern Maya Lowlands by Lisa J. Lucero
SOUTH AMERICA
Chapter 12. Agricultural Innovation, Intensification, and Sociopolitical Development: The Case of Highland Irrigation Agriculture on the Pacific Andean Watersheds by Patrick Ryan Williams
Chapter 13. Intensification, Political Economy, and the Farming Community: In Defense of a Bottom-Up Perspective of the Past by Clark L. Erickson
Chapter 14. Prehispanic Agricultural Strategies of Intensification in the Titicaca Basin of Peru and Bolivia by Charles Stanish
DISCUSSION
Chapter 15. Intensification and the Political Economy: A Contextual Overview by Vernon L. Scarborough