Increasing Returns to Agricultural Intensification at Angkor, Cambodia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The dominant view in economic anthropology has been that agricultural intensification involves decreasing returns. This view is difficult to reconcile with the emergence of urban systems, which requires improved labor and land productivity to support non-food producers in urban centers. The issue is especially salient with respect to Greater Angkor Region (Cambodia, ninth to thirteenth centuries CE), the most extensive preindustrial urban agglomeration yet documented through archaeological research. Ethnographic studies of smallholder agriculture suggest decreasing returns are often associated with intensification, but rice cultivation in Southeast Asia was often organized at the community scale and utilized extensive hydraulic infrastructure. In this paper, we utilize settlement scaling theory to argue that this system of agricultural production did in fact yield increasing returns to farming labor, thus enabling a sizeable urban population to be supported without necessarily immiserating farmers. We also find spatial patterns in agricultural temple communities that are consistent with the incorporation of agricultural production within the urban economy. Our results suggest the rise of urbanism at Angkor was enabled by increasing returns to agricultural labor, brought about through the same mechanisms that structure other forms of production in urban economies, past and present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33404