Graeme Barker, David Gilbertson

• 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