While household land is held in trust by the desa, articulating the ritual-economic relationship between humans and gods, there are also other kinds of collectively held land. Laba pura is productive land reserved for the material support of particular temples. Many desa and temples also have land (tanah bukti) reserved for the support of desa officials (klian, bendesa) or temple priests (pemangku). Streets, pathways and other public spaces including setra are collective property and are maintained by banjar, as are local community halls (bale banjar). Productive land, on the other hand, is generally privately owned, a right established initially by clearing and cultivation, later by capture and redistribution by local rulers and currently by sale and purchase.

Across this mosaic of desa and agricultural land are overlaid the historical designs and ambitions of a series of ruling elites, many of them descended from noble warriors of the Hindu-Javanese empire of Majapahit whose forces invaded Bali in the 14th century. They brought with them more hierarchical modes of social and political organization, which were also inscribed onto the landscape. A proportion of desa in this part of Bali thus have, superimposed on the linear/axial spatial organisation described above, a centric, mandala form, focused on a central crossroads, where rulers built puri (palaces), markets and temples. In most of these desa, the bale agung has been relocated to a pura desa in this central complex. ^[10]

As well as appropriating and reconfiguring the ritual (or niskala) landscape of desa, new or invading puri took control of substantial areas of productive land, which they allowed their subject populations to continue to cultivate through various arrangements. The most distinctive and widely used in this part of Bali was a system known as pecatu or tanah ayahan puri, by which land was made available to farmers for their subsistence in exchange not for a portion of the crop but for certain services to the puri. The nature of pecatu has been the subject of considerable debate since the attempts of the first Dutch administrators to make sense of it (Gunning and van der Heiden 1926; de Kat Angelino 1921).The debate essentially concerns the extent to which it was a system of forced labour, of patronage or a variation on traditional desa obligations (Boon 1977: 56; Geertz 1980: 176; Hobart et al 1996: 55; Schulte-Nordholt 1996: 60; Warren 1993: 63). It is my impression that the divergence of interpretations probably reflects as much local differences of practice and terminology as it does the relative correctness of the authors. What is significant here is that it is a system in which rights to productive land are exchanged for labour obligations. As a result, just as residential land was occupied subject to ritual obligations to the gods via the desa, use of much productive land became increasingly subject to corresponding obligations to puri. ^[11]