Includes chapters on the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, Oceania, Mesoamerica, South America. Theoretical perspectives and approaches provide a framework for agricultural land-use and water management. An invaluable resource for those engaged in ongoing debates about the role of intensification and agriculture in the past and present.

Introduction (Joyce Marcus and Charles Stanish); MESOPOTAMIA: Intensified Large-scale Irrigation as an Aspect of Imperial Policy: Strategies of Statecraft on the Late Sasanian Mesopotamian Plain (Robert McC. Adams); From Highland to Desert: The Organization and Landscape of Irrigation in S. Arabia (Tony Wilkinson); ASIA:Intensification as Situated Process: Landscape History and Collapse (Kathleen Morrison); Water Supply, Labor Organisation and Land Ownership in Indus Floodplain Agricultural Systems (Heather M-L Miller); EUROPE: The Barren and the Fertile: Central and Local Intensification Strategies across Variable Landscapes (Tina L Thurston); Irrigation in Medieval Spain: A Personal Narrative across a Generation (Thomas F Glick); OCEANIA: Agricultural Intensification: A Polynesian Perspective (Patrick V Kirch); MESOAMERICA: The Roles of Ritual and Technology in Mesoamerican Water Management (Joyce Marcus); Agricultural Intensification, Water and Political Power in the Southern Maya Lowlands (Lisa Lucero); SOUTH AMERICA: Agricultural Innovation, Intensification, and Sociopolitical Development: the Case of Highland Irrigation Agriculture on the Pacific Andean Watersheds(Ryan Williams<); Intensification, Political Economy, and the Farming Community: In Defense of a Bottom-Up Perspective of the Past (Clark Erickson); Prehispanic agricultural strategies of intensification in the Titicaca Basin of Peru and Bolivia (Charles Stanish); DISCUSSION: Intensification and the Political Economy: A Contextual Overview (Vern Scarborough).