The chapters in this book discuss successes and failures of past land use and settlement in drylands, and contribute to wider debates about desertification and the sustainability of dryland settlement.

Part I Introduction 1 Living at the margin: themes in the archaeology of drylands 2 The dynamic climatology of drylands Part II Southwest and Central Asia 3 The decline of desert agriculture: a view from the classical period Negev 4 Farmers, herders and miners in the Wadi Faynan, southern Jordan: a 10,000-year landscape archaeology 5 Differing strategies for water supply and farming in the Syrian Black Desert 6 Irrigation agriculture in Central Asia: a long-term perspective from Turkmenistan Part III Sahara and Sahel 7 Conquests and land degradation in the eastern Maghreb during classical antiquity and the Middle Ages 8 Success, longevity, and failure of arid-land agriculture: Romano-Libyan floodwater farming in the Tripolitanian pre-desert 9 Twelve thousand years of human adaptation in Fezzan (Libyan Sahara)10 Farming and famine: subsistence strategies in Highland Ethiopia Part IV Eastern and southern Africa 11 Engaruka: farming by irrigation in Maasailand, c.AD 1400-1700 12 The agricultural landscape of the Nyanga area of Zimbabwe 13 Fifteenth-century agropastoral responses to a disequilibrial ecosystem in southeastern Botswana 14 Islands of intensive agriculture in African drylands: towards an explanatory framework Part V North and Central America 15 Prehistoric agriculture and anthropogenic ecology of the North American Southwest 16 The role of maguey in the Mesoamerican tierra fría: ethnographic, historic and archaeological perspectives Part VI Europe 17 Traditional irrigation systems in dryland Switzerland 18 Desertification, land degradation and land abandonment in the Rhône valley, France