ABSTRACT
Shifting and swidden cultivation is a food production system, which is very demanding on space-time in the settlement system and therefore allows relatively low population densities compared to other cultivation systems. The land cropping cycle, the residence cycle and the size of the local territory are clearly interrelated. Although the shifting cultivation ecotechnology generally gives a higher carrying capacity of land than food collecting, a process by which shifting cultivators gradually deplete the land resources within local prism range can be discerned, as was the case with hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads. The activity structure of a shifting cultivation population can thus be looked upon as a space-time packing process, where crop-cum-fallow parcels are packed into a territorial space-time budget. The carrying capacity of the local prism habitat is conditioned by a multitude of different factors, negative and positive constraints which intersect to give a set of feasible activity alternatives within which the system can operate.
