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 AD. 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. The dry interior districts of Northern Karnataka, which supported this great city, pose special challenges to agricultural production; the success of the city depended on meeting these challenges. This volume considers the diverse repertoire of agricultural strategies practiced by Vijayanagara food producers, using evidence from original research on archaeology, paleoecology, and written texts. A primary focus of the volume is the process of agricultural intensification, a process critically important to both the initial founding of the city and its dramatic expansion in the early sixteenth century. The author argues that understanding the course or path of intensification is critically important and an essential prerequisite to coming to terms with competing causal models for agricultural change.
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