Anthropological conceptions of the nature and course of agricultural change have been strongly influenced by the seminal work of Ester Boserup. In this paper I suggest that the Boserup model is best viewed as one example of a unilineal and universalizing cultural-evolutionary stage typology. As such it evinces many of the same weaknesses as other neoevolutionary schemes that purport to describe change in sets of linked cultural, technological, and organizational attributes. At the heart of the Boserup model is a set of propositions about the nature of economic organization and of change, propositions that find expression in a series of quasi-historical stages that falsely sequentialize modal agricultural strategies. I argue, however, that diversity and variability are critical aspects of both the structure of agricultural production and the process of agricultural intensification. The utility of this model and its constructed sequence of change is considered in light of a case study from late precolonial southem India. In this analysis, archaeological, historical, and palaeobotanical data from the area surrounding the city of Vijayanagara suggest that multiple strategies of agricultural production were pursued simultaneously and, further, that the course of change was itself complex, incorporating diverse scales and forms of production differentially employed by producers at all levels of society.