Intensive agriculture played a pivotal role in the development of archaic states, but there is considerable debate concerning its relationship to population growth, climatic variability, and centralization.

Forty-three years later these words still ring true, but are too seldom followed (Fedick 1996). For several years, we have been engaged in a multidisciplinary programme of research in northwestern Belize and neighbouring areas of Guatemala, eliciting a comprehensive, integrated picture of changing ancient Maya landscapes (Scarborough & Dunning 1996; Valdez et al. 1997). Our goals include a reconstructive correlation of environmental and cultural history, including the relationship between changes in water and land management and political economic organization. This work is still in progress and our understanding is far from complete (Dunning & Scarborough 1997).

Farmers in Late Iron Age Denmark lived in centuries-old villages, within territories inhabited for milfennia. Long-held patterns of settlement, movement, economic interaction and socio-political structure characterized the cultural landscapes of these loosely integrated, heterarchical societies. During the transition to a state in the late Viking Age, many new settlements were established and rapid landscape change transformed older communities into highly controlled, newly regulated places.

Sauer (1925) saw the terrestrial scene as more than a natural arena for human action. He recognized the repeated human impact on a living earth which created an ever-changing stage of landscape. Geographical conceptions of landscape have changed in the intervening 75 years. Today, geographers acknowledge the historically contingent qualities of nature and society and their inter-relationships (Zimmerer 1994).

Rummidge and Euphoria are places on the map of a comic world which resembles the one We are standing on without corresponding exactly to it, and which is peopled by figments of the imagination.