Production is the totality of operations aimed at procuring for a society
the material means of existence . . . In the end we see that all production
is a twofold act subject to the technical norms of a certain relationship
between men and nature and to the social norms governing the relations between
men in their use of the factors of production. (Godelier, 1978a:71)
Vijayanagara, the "city of victory," was the capital city of
an expansive empire which lay claim to large tracts of land in southern
India between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries a.d. For the approximately
two hundred years of its existence, Vijayanagara was not merely a political
center, it was also a population center and a locus of production, trade,
and consumption. Today this great city lies abandoned and although there
has been a continuous record of human settlement in the region, it was not
until the twentieth century that large settlements again developed in this
area. The dry interior districts of northern Karnataka present special challenges
to agricultural production, including shallow soils, rocky slopes, and a
low and highly variable rainfall regime. The success of the city depended
on meeting these challenges. There would be no city, then, and perhaps no
empire without the diverse repertoire of agricultural strategies practiced
by Vijayanagara food producers, without "fields of victory."
Agricultural production is, however, not just a base upon which political
and social structures are built. The organization of agricultural production
is itself integrally connected to demography, ecology, and culture. This
organization is flexible, and the courses and causes of its change are a
fundamental analytical concern of this work. Agricultural production provides
an excellent example of what Godelier refers to as a "twofold act,"
lying as it does at an intersection between ecological and social forces,
broadly conceived.
Chapter 1 reviews the concept of productive intensification, with particular
focus on the roles accorded to intensification in archaeological research
and on the overall perspectives by which such discussions of economic processes
are structured. The process of intensification itself is considered next,
suggesting that an understanding of the course of change is an essential
prerequisite for coming to terms with competing models of cause. The remainder
of the book is devoted to the examination of one such study-the path of
agricultural change in and around the city of Vijayanagara.
The second chapter introduces the agricultural landscape of the study area.
This landscape consists both of physical features of the environment and
of a repertoire of crops, facilities, and techniques of production.
Chapter 3 presents geographical, archaeological, and historical background
on the southern Deccan and Karnatak Plateau regions. This chapter reviews
the major themes in Vijayanagara historiography and their implications for
the definition of archaeological research problems and for archaeological
analysis. The sociopolitical context of Vijayanagara agricultural production,
particularly the important mechanism of temple investment in agriculture,
is introduced.
The fourth chapter introduces the Vijayanagara Metropolitan Survey, a program
of systematic regional survey in the hinterland of the city of Vijayanagara.
The aims of the survey, sampling strategies, recording procedures, and its
relationship to archaeological and architectural research in the city itself
are discussed. This chapter also summarizes some of the results of the survey,
with special emphasis on the content and distribution of settlement, transportation,
and agricultural facilities.
Chapter 5 discusses general patterns of land use, settlement, and transport
identified through survey. Some preliminary interpretations relating to
zonation, patterns of growth and decline, and scalar and typological variation
in land use are suggested.
A review of the corpus of contemporary texts relating to Vijayanagara opens
the sixth chapter. The brief descriptive accounts of the city and region
presented by European and Islamic travellers, traders, and ambassadors are
discussed in light of what they reveal about land use, labor, and political
control. Stone and copper inscriptions, usually associated with temples,
constitute the other major corpus of historical material, essential to understanding
the nature of agricultural investment. A quantitative study of published
inscriptions is presented in order to document the early sixteenth-century
expansion of reservoir and canal construction.
Chapter 7 presents the results of analyses of Vijayanagara vegetation. After
a brief introduction to some methodological issues in pollen and charcoal
analysis from lacustrine sediments, the sampling program from the Kamalapuram
Kere, a Vijayanagara-period reservoir, is described. The results of pollen
and charcoal analysis are discussed in terms of vegetation and fire history
and the hydraulic regime of the reservoir.
The final chapter returns to the issue of productive intensification, drawing
together the evidence from chapters 4 through 7. The overall course of Vijayanagara
agricultural intensification is charted, and discussed in view of more general
models of change.
Kathleen D. Morrison