ARROW-17753: [Python][Docs] Document cleaning for fixing build environment issues

docs/source/developers/python.rst

@@ -636,6 +636,46 @@ Caveats
 
 The Plasma component is not supported on Windows.
 
+Deleting stale build artifacts
+==============================
+
+When there have been changes to the structure of the Arrow C++ library or PyArrow,
+a thorough cleaning is recommended as a first attempt to fixing build errors.
+
+.. note::
+
+   It is not necessarily intuitive from the error itself that the problem is due to stale artifacts.
+   Example of a build error from stale artifacts is "Unknown CMake command "arrow_keep_backward_compatibility"".
+
+To delete stale Arrow C++ build artifacts:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+   $ rm -rf arrow/cpp/build
+
+To delete stale PyArrow build artifacts:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+   $ git clean -Xfd python
+
+If using a Conda environment, there are some build artifacts that get installed in
+``$ARROW_HOME`` (aka ``$CONDA_PREFIX``). For example, ``$ARROW_HOME/lib/cmake/Arrow*``,
+``$ARROW_HOME/include/arrow``, ``$ARROW_HOME/lib/libarrow*``, etc.
+
+These files can be manually deleted. If unsure which files to erase, one approach
+is to recreate the Conda environment.
+
+Either delete the current one, and start fresh:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+   $ conda deactivate
+   $ conda remove -n pyarrow-dev
+
+Or, less destructively, create a different environment with a different name.
+
+
 Installing Nightly Packages
 ===========================