Evidence from the Pampa de Mocan offers a new model for landscape development in an often-neglected setting of the North Coast of Peru: agriculturally marginal landscapes. By shifting focus away from center-oriented models that typically attribute landscape change to structuring projects (i.e. irrigation), this project investigates large-scale transformations in terms of small-scale, agent-based decisions and the self-reinforcing sequences they initiate. However, current environmental archaeology methodologies are incongruent with the spatial and temporal scale that these investigations require. In this study, settlement survey is combined with archaeobotanical sampling in order to reconstruct the inextricable histories of environmental change and settlement in the Mocan landscape.