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The hinterland of Cusco was also subject to planning under Pachakuti Inka Yupanki, particularly agricultural developments such as terracing, channelization, and the construction of qolqa. This chapter analyzes its settlement patterns. Between 400m and 1.5km from the city center, eight suburban villages have been identified in which archaeology has located one palace, shrines, burials, and general constructional debris. These villages are mainly located on the royal roads into the city and housed the elite, yanakuna, and craftsmen. Further out, there are distinctive settlements associated with inka agricultural schemes and land reclamation. There are fourteen inka workers’ villages (llaqta), which are well planned with rows of houses. They range in size and are thought to have housed mitayoq laborers, tribute workers from the near and distant provinces. There are also five isolated inka kancha that are distinctive in plan and archaeology and were inhabited by the elite, who oversaw agricultural production and storage. Integral to this network were specific groups of state storerooms, or qolqa.

This chapter discusses the role circa situm (farmer-based conservation) approaches play in conserving valuable tree species in dry forest agro-ecosystems in Mesoamerica. These approaches have been used to distinguish the very different circumstances of conservation within altered agricultural landscapes outside natural habitats but within a species' native geographical range. The chapter also considers the conditions and for what species circa situm approaches will prove effective and how it might be implemented.

Chapter 5 draws on a broad range of evidence to develop a view of what the agricultural landscape of the Rio Hondo basin, now on the Belize-Mexican border, must have looked like in the heavily populated Classic era landscape. The authors use Contact period Spanish accounts to describe trade in agricultural products–especially cacao, but also achiote and vanilla–that were particularly prized from this region. Ten years of research on the drained field agricultural systems, such as the Chan Cahal fields near Blue Creek, identified the timespan for commercial level production, and computer assisted analysis of aerial and satellite photographs are beginning to document the massive scale of this enterprise.