The recent Columbian polemic contrasted beneficial New World land use before 1492 with destructive Old World land management. Since archaeologists are uniquely equipped to document and model long-term settlement and land-use histories, there is both challenge and opportunity to empirically examine the ecological impact of particular agrosystems within long time frames. This paper examines the risk-minimization and ecological fine-tuning of the Mediterranean agrosystem, and its long-term ecological performance. The Mediterranean ecosystem is the product of millennia of co-evolution between the environment and human activities, but traditional land-use has been conservative and ecologically adaptive, despite sporadic disequilibrium. The deviations from the norm pose a number of testable hypotheses for further examination, not only in the Mediterranean region but also in other areas such as the New World.