This book is about the construction of a landscape. The landscape in question is the intensive agricultural terraced landscape of Konso in south-west Ethiopia. The book focuses on the role of culture in the construction of the landscape, and explores the significance for development of the landscape itself, and the social and cultural institutions that construct and maintain it. Through this study of one landscape and one people it is hoped that the processes and connections between different aspects of people's lives and their environments will be better understood, contributing to understandings of landscape production in general, and generating insights that will be of relevance to initiatives concerned with environmental conservation and the tackling of poverty.

Konso lends itself to this study. It is an excellent example of an indigenous and intensive agricultural landscape that has been maintained for at least four hundred years, despite what can only have been enormous social changes. The Konso hills rise to a height of 2000m out of the dry Rift Valley plains, and the rugged hillsides are scored with dry stone-walled bench terraces constructed meticulously by hand. Each terrace is divided into square-ridged basins and covered in a riot of crops such as sorghum, maize, millet, qat (the narcotic), cotton, coffee, beans, and sweet potatoes. Trees are also grown on the terraces. There are other hilly areas in the region: some are terraced or have other soil and water conservation structures, but none is worked as intensively as Konso (Amborn, 1989).