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Against the Grain (Scott 2017) is a smart introduction to how archaeologists and historians now think differently about the shifts to sedentism, agriculture and emergent statehood. James C. Scott’s...

Neolithic material engagements transformed the ways in which communities interacted with the physical world and one another. Based on evidence from the flanks of the Zagros Mountains, in western Iran and north‐eastern Iraq, Robert Braidwood initially proposed his ‘Hilly Flanks’ hypothesis for the origins of agriculture and sedentism. The evidence for multi‐centred developments in domestication has demonstrated that elements of these practices spanned south‐west Asia in the Early Neolithic. The Zagros Mountains (and the eastern branch of the Fertile Crescent as a whole) constituted an area of vibrant engagement with new ideas, materials, experimentation and innovation, participating in the networks of interaction and exchange that facilitated the spread of alternative lifeways. This research examines how engagements with clay influenced the development and spread of new ways of thinking about the physical world, highlighting the role of clay as a transformational material through sites in the Central Zagros.

The Aceramic Neolithic site of Ganj Dareh (Kermanshah, Iran) is arguably one of the most significant sites for enhancing our understanding of goat domestication and the onset of sedentism. Despite its central importance, it has proven difficult to obtain contextually reliable data from it and integrate the site in regional syntheses because it was never published in full after excavations ceased in 1974. This paper presents the Ganj Dareh archive at Université de Montréal and shows how the documentation and artifacts it comprises still offer a great deal of useful information about the site. In particular, we 1) present the first stratigraphic profile for the site, which reveals a more complex depositional history than Smith’s five-level sequence; 2) reveal the presence of two possible pre-agricultural levels (H-01 and P-01); 3) explore the spatial organization of different levels; 4) explain possible discrepancies in the radiocarbon dates from the site; 5) show some differences in lithic technological organization in levels H-01 and P-01 suggestive of higher degrees of residential mobility than subsequent phases of occupation at the site; and 6) reanalyze the burial data to broaden our understanding of Aceramic Neolithic mortuary practices in the Zagros. These data help refine our understanding of Ganj Dareh’s depositional and occupational history and recenter it as a key site to improve our understanding the Neolithization process in the Middle East.

We investigate the incidence of early warfare among foragers and farmers in prehistory. Our focus is specifically on conflict over land. Food is produced using inputs of labor and land, and the probability of victory in a conflict depends on relative group sizes. The group sizes are determined by individual migration and Malthusian population dynamics. Both factors result in larger populations at better sites, which deters attack. There are two necessary conditions for warfare: high enough individual mobility costs and large enough shocks to the relative productivities of the sites. Together, these conditions are sufficient. In particular, technological or environmental shocks that alter the productivities of sites can trigger warfare, but only if individual agents do not change sites in response. These results are consistent with evidence from archaeology and anthropology.

The data presented in this paper provide direct microbotanical evidence concerning the early use of potato (Solanum tuberosum) within its botanical locus of origin in the high south-central Andes. The data derive from Jiskairumoko, an early village site in the western Titicaca Basin dating to the Late Archaic to Early Formative periods (∼3,400 cal y BC to 1,600 cal y BC). Because the site reflects the transition to sedentism and food production, these data may relate to potato domestication and early cultivation. Of 141 starch microremains recovered from 14 groundstone tools from Jiskairumoko, 50 are identified as consistent with cultivated or domesticated potato, based on reference to published materials and a study of wild and cultivated potato starch morphology. Along with macro- and microbotanical evidence for chenopod consumption and grinding tool data reflecting intensive use of this technology throughout site occupation, the microbotanical data reported here suggest the intensive exploitation, if not cultivation, of plant resources at Jiskairumoko. Elucidating the details of the trajectory of potato domestication is necessary for an overall understanding of the development of highland Andean agriculture, as this crop is central to the autochthonous agricultural suite. A paucity of direct botanical evidence, however, has hindered research efforts. The results of the modern and archaeological starch analyses presented here underscore the utility of this method in addressing questions related to the timing, mode, and context of potato origins.

The Neolithic is a key topic in the study of Old World prehistory but how the Neolithic is defined varies between regions. In East Asia the invention of pottery is often seen as marking the start of the Neolithic. In contrast to this ‘eastern’ perspective, in western parts of Eurasia it is the presence of agriculture that usually defines the onset of a Neolithic way of life. This paper adopts a comparative perspective, examining the origins and development of pottery, agriculture and sedentary life in East Asia and Southwest Asia. We suggest that a comparative perspective indicates that some of the most enduring themes of Neolithic studies need to be reconsidered, namely: (1) the idea of a Neolithic package consisting of a number of associated traits (including, among other things, agriculture, sedentary sites, and pottery) that developed and spread together, (2) the notion of the Neolithic as a revolutionary event marking a sharp break from the preceding Palaeolithic period, and (3) the enduring impact of the Neolithic on later periods.

Investigations at the Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, documented an artificial plateau, measuring 600 x 340 m in horizontal dimensions and 6 to 15 m in height. Unlike highly visible pyramids, such horizontally extensive constructions covered by the rainforest are difficult to recognize on the ground, but airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) revealed its planned form. Excavations carried out over many years provided data on its construction sequence, fill volumes, and labor investments. The initial construction of the plateau occurred around 950 B.C. when a formal ceremonial complex was built in its center. This was the period when the inhabitants of the Maya lowlands were adopting a new way of life with greater reliance on maize agriculture, full sedentism, and ceramic use. The inhabitants of areas surrounding Ceibal, who retained certain levels of residential mobility, probably participated in the construction of the plateau. In this regard, the Ceibal plateau is comparable to monumental constructions that emerged before or during the transition to agriculture or sedentism in other parts of the world. The data from Ceibal compel researchers to examine the social implications of monumental constructions in the Maya lowlands before the establishment of centralized polities with hereditary rulers. Unlike pyramids, where access to the summits may have been limited to privileged individuals, the horizontal monumentality of the plateau was probably more conducive to inclusive interaction. The Ceibal plateau continued to be built up during the Preclassic period (1000 B.C.-A.D. 175), and its fill volume substantially surpassed those of pyramids. Large-scale construction projects likely promoted organizational and managerial innovations among participants, which may have set the stage for later administrative centralization.

The transition from foraging to farming is certainly one of the most dramatic processes in human history. The use of domesticated plants and animals spread widely across Southwest Europe from the Near East. By contrast, domesticated plants solely moved across the American Southwest from Mexico. Research in Western Europe has traditionally focused on the movement of farming communities across the region which displaced or subsumed local foragers. Recently various aspects of this process have been debated including Mesolithic and Neolithic subsistence packages, continuity versus replacement, regional mobility and sedentism, the nature of early Neolithic villages, and the forager to farmer transition. We will explore this dynamic and varied process through studies conducted in Southwest Europe and the American Southwest. Although these two regions seem quite different, researchers in both areas are grappling with similar research issues. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Objectives To examine the femoral midshaft morphological characteristics in hunter-gathering Natufian and farming Pre-pottery Neolithic (PPN) populations in the southern Levant and relate these to changes in mobility, physical stress, and diet. Materials and Methods 32 Natufian, 41 PPNB, and 26 PPNC femora, dating from 14,900 to 8,250 cal BP, were studied. Femoral diaphyseal cross-sectional images were obtained from CT scans. Dedicated software was used to measure cross-sectional breadths, areas, cortical bone thickness, rigidity, and strength. Results Two general temporal trends in femoral bone architecture were observed: (1) a continuous decline in the relative amount of bone tissue (cortical area/total area) due to expansion of the medullary cavity and (2) an increase in circularity (decrease in anteroposterior/mediolateral ratios) together with an overall decline in bone rigidity and strength, mainly apparent in the later PPNC. The first trend suggests a gradual decline in nutritional quality and health continuing from the Natufian through the late Neolithic. The second trend is interpreted as a result of increased sedentism with the full establishment of agriculture. Discussion The transition to food production in the southern Levant was accompanied by reduced physical stress and mobility, with the most marked effects occurring toward the end of the PPN with increasing sedentism. Deterioration of nutrition and health also occurred, but more continuously from the beginning of the PPN. Thus, environmental changes associated with the agricultural transition in this region of the world were gradual and prolonged, with direct dietary effects more apparent earlier than reductions in mobility. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

As the last habitable continent colonized by humans, the site of multiple domestication hotspots, and the location of the largest Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, South America is central to human prehistory. Yet remarkably little is known about human population dynamics during colonization, subsequent expansions, and domestication. Here we reconstruct the spatiotemporal patterns of human population growth in South America using a newly aggregated database of 1,147 archaeological sites and 5,464 calibrated radiocarbon dates spanning fourteen thousand to two thousand years ago (ka). We demonstrate that, rather than a steady exponential expansion, the demographic history of South Americans is characterized by two distinct phases. First, humans spread rapidly throughout the continent, but remained at low population sizes for 8,000 years, including a 4,000-year period of 'boom-and-bust' oscillations with no net growth. Supplementation of hunting with domesticated crops and animals had a minimal impact on population carrying capacity. Only with widespread sedentism, beginning ~5 ka, did a second demographic phase begin, with evidence for exponential population growth in cultural hotspots, characteristic of the Neolithic transition worldwide. The unique extent of humanity's ability to modify its environment to markedly increase carrying capacity in South America is therefore an unexpectedly recent phenomenon.

Large-scale food storage has been identified at an Early Mesolithic settlement on the east coast of Sweden, implying a delayed-return subsistence strategy. The excavation and analysis of the contents of a 9200-year-old construction, combined with ethnographic analogies and modern knowledge of microbial activity, suggest that fish was fermented at the site. The identification of a foraging economy fermenting substantial amounts of fish, and conserving it for later use, thousands of years prior to farming and urbanized communities and without the use of salt, has implications for how we perceive the Early Mesolithic, suggesting semi-sedentism, technological skill and the ability to adapt rapidly to changing environmental conditions. Evidence of a delayed-return practice in Early Mesolithic foraging contexts raises questions regarding the current models used to estimate demographic parameters, such as population density and birth rate, for that time period, as well as indicating the existence of a more complex society than previously realized.

Recent excavations at the site of Soro Mik’aya Patjxa in the south-central Andes have revealed the earliest securely dated cultural features in the Lake Titicaca Basin. Radiocarbon assays show that the site was occupied across the Middle to Late Archaic period transition between 8000 and 6700 cal BP. The rich material assemblage makes it possible to identify behavioural patterns among these last hunter-gatherers of the Titicaca Basin, which anticipate later developments in the trajectory to socioeconomic complexity. Mobile hunter-gatherers appear to have occupied the site repeatedly for more than a millennium. Evidence for intensive subsistence practices and interpersonal violence foreshadow the emergence of incipient sedentism, food production and land tenure in subsequent periods.

For most of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed, small mobile foraging bands followed natural resources. Starting around 15,000 years ago, communities of sedentary foragers began to emerge. This transition has been detected archeologically in numerous regions of the world, including southwest Asia and Japan. In these cases and others, the transition to sedentary foraging occurred several millennia before the transition to agriculture. We develop an economic model of this process that combines climate change, population growth, and technical progress. Better climate led to a larger population for Malthusian reasons, and in some cases this led to technological innovation. A novel insight from our theory is that technological change caused a ratchet effect that made sedentism persist even in cases where climate subsequently deteriorated.

The Neolithic period in NW-Europe marks a time of major transformation in human lifestyle including sedentism, farming, agropastoralism with early animal husbandry and the use of ornamented pottery by “Funnelbeaker” societies. Domestic animals, in particular cattle, served for traction, plowing, and manuring to support agricultural production but also supplied a variety of dietary products including meat, fat, and milk as well as wool. The impact of animal husbandry on improved living conditions in Neolithic societies and in a religious context has been inferred throughout NW-Europe and even earlier in African and Arabian regions by ritual cattle deposits. However, a potential spiritual/religious role of cattle in Neolithic societies is difficult to assess further due to the lack of interpretable Neolithic illustrations. Here, we demonstrate the ritual role of cattle in Neolithic societies from burial gifts preserved in Megalith tombs (3640–2900 BC) of Wangels, NW-Germany, where storage vessels for afterlife alimentary provision of the deceased contained cattle meat and milk products identified by their characteristic lipids but no common aquatic food sources or cereals. Pottery from the latest burial phase only yielded fatty acids which may derive from essential plant oils of Sea Buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) that may have served as precious burial gift for medical or for alimentary purposes. The status of cattle as an object of veneration in Neolithic societies is represented by its dominating contribution to grave gifts underlining the esteem cattle received not only in agroeconomical but even further in ritual and religious respect.

The article reviews The Origins of Inequality, a collection of essays brought together by Andrea Cardarelli, Alberto Cazzella and Marcella Frangipane following a series of seminars on this theme at the University of Roma La Sapienza. The volume was formally presented at the university in May 2017 as the focus of a discussion of its theme by a philosopher (Giacomo Marramao), economic historian (Monika Poettinger), cultural anthropologist (Alessandro Lupo) and archaeologist (Graeme Barker). The review is an edited version of Graeme Barker���s contribution, which he structured in terms of the book���s evidence of how the research agenda has developed in the 20 years since Gary Feinman summarised it in his final chapter in the book he edited with Douglas Price, The Foundations of Social Inequality (New York: Plenum Press, 1995).

In this paper I describe how the notion of sedentism gradually became central to Natufian studies. Described at first (1932) by Dorothy Garrod as a mixture of characteristic hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist features, the Natufian culture immediately raised difficult issues, including that of reconciling the mobility traditionally associated to hunting with the care of crops in sowed fields. Later findings of architectural constructions by Jean Perrot at Ain Mallaha (Eynan) led to the notion that Natufian people already experienced a sedentary way of life at least in some favourable environments. Simultaneously, however, based on faunal analysis and a lack of vegetal remains, Perrot asserted that they had not yet reached the stage of food production. Accordingly, he introduced the concept of sedentary hunter-gatherers, reversing the traditional supposition that sedentism appeared as a consequence of agricultural practices. I will address the further integration of sedentism in the theoretical framework of the origins of agriculture and describe the attempts made to clarify the modalities of occupation at specific sites. In a final discussion I will take a critical view of these attempts, acknowledging the difficulties in decoding the residency patterns of the Natufian people and advocating for detailed studies focused on each specific situation. I will furthermore acknowledge that the beginnings of the processes of both plant and animal domestication are still so obscure that, while Perrot’s claim seems to be basically correct, more work is needed before we can reach a satisfying understanding of the role of sedentism in the neolithization process., L’article décrit comment la notion de sédentarité s’est imposée progressivement dans les études natoufiennes. Dès son individualisation en 1932 par Dorothy Garrod, le Natoufien est apparu comme un paradoxe à cause de l’association de microlithes traditionnellement associés à des chasseurs-cueilleurs mobiles et de lames de faucilles qui suggéraient des champs semés et surveillés par des sédentaires en possession de céréales domestiques. Plus tard, la découverte par Jean Perrot à Ain Mallaha de constructions impressionnantes, groupées, associées à des greniers et à des sépultures, dans un contexte où la faune était entièrement sauvage et où les végétaux n’étaient pas conservés, a conduit à la notion de chasseurs-cueilleurs sédentaires en opposition au point de vue traditionnel pour qui la sédentarité était la conséquence de la domestication. Les chercheurs se sont ensuite efforcés d’intégrer cette nouvelle donne dans la théorie de la néolithisation de sorte que la sédentarité est devenue un enjeu central des études natoufiennes et que les modalités de l’occupation des sites ont été régulièrement discutées. Un rapide bilan de ces discussions s’efforce de prendre du recul par rapport à l’état des lieux. On insiste sur les difficultés rencontrées par les tentatives d’élucider les modalités de l’occupation des sites au Natoufien et sur le besoin d’examens scrupuleux dans chaque cas particulier. De plus, les origines des différents cheminements qui ont conduits à la domestication des plantes et des animaux sont encore obscures de sorte que, si l’opinion de J. Perrot semble globalement exacte, beaucoup de travail sera encore nécessaire avant qu’on comprenne comment la sédentarité est impliquée dans le processus de néolithisation., Valla F. R. Sedentism, the “point of non return”, and the Natufian issue. An historical perspective. In: Paléorient, 2018, vol. 44, n°1. pp. 19-33.

Many hunter-gatherer groups live on the outskirts of wider society, experiencing poor health outcomes with little access to medical care. From a development perspective, key interventions include the sedentarisation of these mobile peoples into camps nearby larger towns with sanitation infrastructure and medical care, as increased access to services is assumed to improve outcomes. However, recent research in the Agta (Philippine foragers from North-east Luzon) has demonstrated that individuals residing in more ‘developed’ communities suffer from increased morbidity and mortality. Here, using quantitative and ethnographic data on health collected between 2002 and 2014, we explore why this trend occurs by examining the relationship between key development initiatives with self-reported illness and the uptake of medical interventions with 415 Agta men, women and children. We demonstrate that health outcomes worsen as sedentarisation progresses, despite some increases in medical access. We argue this is because the development paradigm is not evidence-based, but rather stems from an ideological dislike of mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Compounded by cultural insensitivity and daily discrimination, current interventions are ill-suited to the unique needs of hunter-gatherers, and thus ineffective. Based on our findings we offer future short and long-term policy suggestions which seek to reduce the Agta's vulnerability, rather than increase it.

South Asia possesses a unique Neolithic transition to agricultural domestication. India has received far less attention in the quest for evidence of early agriculture than other regions of the world traditionally recognized as “centers of domestication” such as southwest Asia, western Asia, China, Mesoamerica, South America, New Guinea, and Africa. Hunter-gatherers with agricultural production appeared around the middle of the Holocene, 4000 to 1500 bce, with the cultivation of domesticates and a correspondingly more sedentary lifestyle emerging at this time. Two thousand years ago South Asia was inhabited by farmers, with densely populated river valleys, coastal plains, urban populations, states, and even empires. While some of the crops that supported these civilizations had been introduced from other regions of the world, a large proportion of these crops had local origins from wild plants native to the subcontinent. As a case study for the origins of agriculture, South Asia has much to offer archaeologists and environmental scientists alike for understanding domestication processes and local transitions from foraging to farming as well as the ways in which early farmers adapted to and transformed the environment and regional vegetation. Information exchange from distant farmers from other agricultural centers into the subcontinent cannot be ruled out. However, it is clear that local agricultural origins occurred via a series of processes, including the dispersal of pastoral and agro-pastoral peoples across regions, the local domestication of animals and plants and the adoption by indigenous hunter-gatherers of food production techniques from neighboring cultures. Indeed, it is posited that local domestication events in India were occurring alongside agricultural dispersals from other parts of the world in an interconnected mosaic of cultivation, pastoralism, and sedentism. As humans in South Asia increasingly relied on a more restricted range of plant species, they became entangled in an increasingly fixed trajectory that allowed greater food production levels to sustain larger populations and support their developing social, cultural and food traditions.

The pre-Contact foraging communities of the north-west coast of North America have long been recognised as exhibiting many of the features we associate with agricultural societies, including sedentism and social inequality. Evidence from the pre-Contact plank house communities of Meier and Cathlapotle throws new light on the spatial organisation of these societies. Detailed analysis of stone tools allows the spatial division of labour to be determined within these large, multi-family households. This reveals that while some tasks were associated with particular social ranks, a hierarchical community can be identified in each plank house. Overall, the differences lie in the degree of engagement rather than the kind of activity, helping to characterise labour organisation among these unique, sedentary foragers. The results also provide insight into the potential of stone tool analysis for social reconstruction

Research on Late Bronze Age relations between Egyptians and local nomadic or semi-nomadic Libyans has hitherto focused almost exclusively on Egyptian textual and iconographic sources. Recent archaeological evidence for grain production and agrarian practice at the Egyptian fortress of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham allows us to address this imbalance, in combination with ethnographic data and cross-cultural parallels drawn from nomad-sedentary interactions in the Near East. Results suggest that Egyptian subsistence in this relatively isolated outpost of the New Kingdom Empire was probably dependent upon Libyan manpower and their knowledge of local environmental conditions and effective farming methods.

An overview of the origins of agriculture cases known from Eurasia and Africa, with a brief survey of the Americas, documents only a few “centers” where subsistence based on founder crops and domesticated animals emerged, and where the additional “noncenters” were identified. By examining the evidence of plant exploitation and eventual cultivation practiced by Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene foragers in regions where the information is sufficiently detailed, together with the nature of their habitation sites, one can trace the common processes for the transition from hunting and gathering to farming communities who continued to exploit supplementary wild resources.

© 2016 Ramsey et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 'Neolithization' pathway refers to the development of adaptations that characterized subsequent Neolithic life, sedentary occupations, and agriculture. In the Levant, the origins of these human behaviors are widely argued to have emerged during the Early Epipaleolithic (ca. 23 ka cal BP). Consequently, there has been a pre-occupation with identifying and modeling the dietary shift to cereal and grains during this period, which is considered to have been a key development that facilitated increasing sedentism and, eventually, agriculture. Yet, direct evidence of plant use in the form of macrobotanical remains is extremely limited at Epipaleolithic sites and the expected 'Neolithization' pathway has not been robustly demonstrated. However, new direct microbotanical phytolith evidence from the large aggregation site of Kharaneh IV, in the Azraq Basin, suggests that increasingly settled occupation was not the result of wild grass and cereal use, but rather the result of a typical hunter-gatherer balance, based on the use of mostly reliable resources supplemented by some risky resources. Moreover, and illustrating this balance, the direct botanical evidence emphases the importance of the wetlands as an under-recognized reliable plant resource. Significantly, the use of these reliable wetland plant resources at Kharaneh IV represents an unexpected 'Neolithization' pathway.

The reasons and processes that led hunter-gatherers to transition into a sedentary and agricultural way of life are a fundamental unresolved question of human history. Here we present results of excavations of two single-occupation early Neolithic sites (dated to 7.9 and 7.4 ka) and two high-resolution archaeological surveys in northeast China, which capture the earliest stages of sedentism and millet cultivation in the second oldest center of domestication in the Old World. The transition to sedentism coincided with a significant transition to wetter conditions in north China, at 8.1-7.9 ka. We suggest that these wetter conditions were an empirical precondition that facilitated the complex transitional process to sedentism and eventually millet domestication in north China. Interestingly, sedentism and plant domestication followed different trajectories. The sedentary way of life and cultural norms evolved rapidly, within a few hundred years, we find complex sedentary villages inhabiting the landscape. However, the process of plant domestication, progressed slowly over several millennia. Our earliest evidence for the beginning of the domestication process appear in the context of an already complex sedentary village (late Xinglongwa culture), a half millennia after the onset of cultivation, and even in this phase domesticated plants and animals were rare, suggesting that the transition to domesticated (sensu stricto) plants in affluent areas might have not played a substantial role in the transition to sedentary societies.

While significant advances have been made towards outlining the diverse processes of agricultural adoption worldwide, many regions including sub-Saharan Africa remain poorly understood owing to uneven archaeological coverage. This paper presents a case study from the West African savanna of a relatively late adoption of sedentism and agriculture. While domesticates were available in the region by ca. 2000 BCE, residents of the Gobnangou Escarpment in southeastern Burkina Faso maintained mobile foraging strategies likely until the 1st millennium CE. Drawing primarily on faunal remains from three archaeological sites spanning almost 7000 years of occupation, this paper explores the complex relationships between the adoption of domesticates, sedentism and long distance logistical expeditions by presenting data from two new early agricultural sites with varying domestic and local/regional wild resource usage. We argue that the Gobnangou is indicative of the diverse choices local communities make during times of economic transition, and highlight the social implications of the adoption processes.

The scale and nature of early cultivation are topics that have received relatively limited attention in research on the origins of agriculture. In Southwest Asia, one the earliest centers of origin worldwide, the transition to food production is commonly portrayed as a macroevolutionary process from hunter-gatherer through to cultivator-forager and farming stages. Climate change, resource intensification, sedentism, rising population densities, and increasing social complexity are widely considered by prehistorians as pivotal to the emergence of protoagricultural village life. In this paper we revisit these narratives that have been influenced by culture-history and social evolution, together forming the dominant theoretical paradigms in the prehistory of Southwest Asia. We propose a complementary contextual approach seeking to reconstruct the historical development of Early Holocene plant-food production and its manifold sociocultural environments by intersecting multiple lines of evidence on the biology...

Development of agriculture is often assumed to be accompanied by a decline in residential mobility, and sedentism is frequently proposed to provide the basis for economic intensification, population growth and increasing social complexity. In Britain, however, the nature of the agricultural transition (ca4000 BC) and its effect on residence patterns has been intensely debated. Some authors attribute the transition to the arrival of populations who practised a system of sedentary intensive mixed farming similar to that of the very earliest agricultural regimes in central Europe,ca5500 BC, with cultivation of crops in fixed plots and livestock keeping close to permanently occupied farmsteads. Others argue that local hunter–gatherers within Britain adopted selected elements of a farming economy and retained a mobile way of life. We use strontium and oxygen isotope analysis of tooth enamel from an Early Neolithic burial population in Gloucestershire, England, to evaluate the residence patterns of early farmers. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that early farming communities in Britain were residentially mobile and were not fully sedentary. Results highlight the diverse nature of settlement strategies associated with early farming in Europe and are of wider significance to understanding the effect of the transition to agriculture on residence patterns.

WOS: 000378272400038, PubMed ID: 27274049, Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia., Marie Curie Initial Training Network (BEAN/Bridging the European and Anatolian Neolithic) [GA 289966]; DFGGerman Research Foundation (DFG) [BU 1403/6-1, BO 4119/1]; Alexander von Humboldt FoundationAlexander von Humboldt Foundation; European Union (EU) SYNTHESYS/Synthesis of Systematic Resources [GA 226506-CP-CSA-INFRA]; VolkswagenstiftungVolkswagen [FKZ: 87161]; Irish Research CouncilIrish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology [GOIPG/2013/1219]; EU CodeX Project [295729]; EU Social Fund; Greek national funds research funding program THALES; Greek national funds research funding program ARISTEIA II; Swiss NSFSwiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) [31003A_156853, 31003A_149920]; BBSRCBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) [BB/L009382/1]; CoMPLEX via EPSRC [EP/F500351/1]; Sir Henry Dale Fellowship - Wellcome Trust [098386/Z/12/Z]; Sir Henry Dale Fellowship - Royal Society [098386/Z/12/Z]; National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre; Wellcome TrustWellcome Trust [100719/Z/12/Z]; University of Mainz; HPC cluster MOGON - DFG [INST 247/602-1 FUGG]; Netherlands Organization for Scientific ResearchNetherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) [380-62-005]; Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research CouncilBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) [BB/L009382/1]; Engineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilEngineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [1357822], We thank Songul Alpaslan for help with sampling in Barcin and Eleni Stravopodi for help with sampling in Theopetra. Z.H. and R.M. are supported by a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (BEAN/Bridging the European and Anatolian Neolithic, GA 289966) awarded to M.C., S.J.S., D.G.B., M.G.T., and J. Burger. C.P., J. Burger and S.K. received funding from DFG (BU 1403/6-1). C.P. and J. Burger received funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. C.S. and M.S. were supported by the European Union (EU) SYNTHESYS/Synthesis of Systematic Resources GA 226506-CP-CSA-INFRA, DFG: (BO 4119/1) and Volkswagenstiftung (FKZ: 87161). L.M.C. is funded by the Irish Research Council (GOIPG/2013/1219). A.S. was supported by the EU CodeX Project 295729. K. Kotsakis, S.T., D.U.-K., P.H., and C.P. were cofinanced by the EU Social Fund and Greek national funds research funding program THALES. C.P., M.U., K. Kotsakis, S.T., and D.U.-K. were cofinanced by the EU Social Fund and the Greek national funds research funding program ARISTEIA II. M.C. was supported by Swiss NSF Grant 31003A_156853. A. K. and D.W. were supported by Swiss NSF Grant 31003A_149920. S.L. is supported by the BBSRC (Grant BB/L009382/1). L.v.D. is supported by CoMPLEX via EPSRC (Grant EP/F500351/1). G.H. is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society (Grant 098386/Z/12/Z) and by the National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. M.G.T. and Y.D. are supported by a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship Grant 100719/Z/12/Z (to M.G.T.). J. Burger is grateful for support by the University of Mainz and the HPC cluster MOGON (funded by DFG; INST 247/602-1 FUGG). F.G. was supported by Grant 380-62-005 of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

At the cusp of food production, Near Eastern societies adopted new territorial practices, including archaeologically visible sedentism and nonsedentary social defenses more challenging to identify archaeologically. New archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence for Arabia's earliest-known sacrifices points to territorial maintenance in arid highland southern Yemen. Here sedentism was not an option prior to agriculture. Seasonally mobile pastoralists developed alternate practices to reify cohesive identities, maintain alliances, and defend territories. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence implies cattle sacrifices were commemorated with a ring of more than 42 cattle skulls and a stone platform buried by 6,400-year-old floodplain sediments. Associated with numerous hearths, these cattle rites suggest feasting by a large gathering, with important sociopolitical ramifications for territories. A GIS analysis of the early Holocene landscape indicates constrained pasturage supporting small resident human populations. Cattle sacrifice in southern Arabia suggests a model of mid-Holocene Neolithic territorial pastoralism under environmental and cultural conditions that made sedentism unsustainable. [prehistory, Arabia, sacrifice, territoriality, Neolithic]

The raw materials from which stone tools are made can provide considerable information relevant to behavioral variation within a prehistoric population. By examining the stone used for tools from two different types of Late Pithouse period (A.D. 550–1000) residential sites from the Mimbres Mogollon area of Southwestern New Mexico, this paper illustrates how understanding the lithic landscape of a region provides a means to assess behavioral variation in stone procurement practices. The analysis indicates that the differences in mobility and economic pursuits between longer-term residential sites containing pit structures and a shorter-term seasonal residential site with ephemeral architecture structured the raw material procurement practices of site’s occupants. Pit structure sites were focused on agricultural pursuits and used a technology that centered on the production of informal tools fashioned from locally available raw materials. The seasonal residential site focused on wild resources and evidenced greater reliance on formal tool production using raw materials acquired from beyond the immediate vicinity of the site. Despite increasing sedentism and agricultural dependence of the region’s population, some portion of the population exercised seasonal mobility strategies and associated technological and behavioral practices more typical of hunting and gathering populations, suggesting a diverse socio-economic system within the region.

The Preceramic occupation of Peru has historically received little attention from scholars. Recent excavations on the North-Central Coast of Peru have identified several large sites with monumental architecture dating to the Late Preceramic Period (3000–1800 BC). Monumental architecture and dense occupation at these sites indicates a degree of sedentism despite the lack of evidence for large-scale agriculture for comestibles and ceramic production. Questions remain, however, with respect to the nature of human dietary regimes without technological innovations that mirror agricultural modes of food production. This preliminary study uses stable isotope ratio analysis of human bones and teeth to assess the dietary regimes at the coastal site of Bandurria. Results support a marine-based diet for individuals sampled. These data are consistent with the maritime hypothesis which suggests that subsistence economy during the formation of Andean civilization relied on small schooling fish as the staple pr...

The emergence of sedentism and agriculture in Amazonia continues to sit uncomfortably within accounts of South American pre-Columbian history. This is partially because deep-seated models were formulated when only ceramic evidence was known, partly because newer data continue to defy simple explanations, and partially because many discussions continue to ignore evidence of pre-Columbian anthropogenic landscape transformations. This paper presents the results of recent geoarchaeological research on Amazonian anthropogenic soils. It advances the argument that properties of two different types of soils, terras pretas and terras mulatas, support their interpretation as correlates of, respectively, past settlement areas and fields where spatially-intensive, organic amendment-reliant cultivation took place. This assessment identifies anthropogenic soil formation as a hallmark of the Amazonian Formative and prompts questions about when similar forms of enrichment first appear in the Amazon basin. The paper reviews evidence for embryonic anthrosol formation to highlight its significance for understanding the domestication of a key Amazonian crop: manioc (Manihot esculenta ssp. esculenta). A model for manioc domestication that incorporates anthropogenic soils outlines some scenarios which link the distribution of its two broader varieties—sweet and bitter manioc—with the widespread appearance of Amazonian anthropogenic dark earths during the first millennium AD.

Variability and seasonality in archaeobotanical and archaeological remains from three adjacent ecosystems in the Papagueria of south-central Arizona are examined in relation to settlement-subsistence hypotheses. A three ecosystem model is developed which indicates that the Hohokam in the Papagueria were able to maintain sedentary villages by utilizing, in different manners, three distinct ecosystems. It is suggested that the Hohokam in this desert region intermittently maintained agricultural field houses in the creosote plains, cacti gathering camps on mountain slopes, and permanent villages and fields on major wash flood plains. To some extent, sedentarism in the Papagueria depended upon exploitation of non-flood plain ecosystems.

Resource intensification is often viewed as a precursor to sedentism and thereby to agriculture. Late Upper Paleolithic sites in China are also seen as important precursors to the beginnings of sedentism and agriculture, but few faunal assemblages have been studied in detail and therefore little is known of pre-Neolithic economies in the region. A large faunal sample from a key site for early pottery and possible rice collection sheds light on subsistence strategies at the end of the Paleolithic. We apply an array of taphonomic analyses to the mammal remains to investigate the extent to which carcasses were processed for within-bone nutrients, which we see as a possible indicator of resource intensification. Determining if this is a regional trend, and/or represents diachronic change in subsistence strategies, will depend on the availability of comparative data in the future.

The transition from foraging to farming is associated with a widespread and well‐documented decline in oral health, wherein women experience a more rapid and dramatic decline than men. Historically, anthropologists have attributed this difference to behavioral factors such as sexual division of labor and gender‐based dietary preferences. However, the clinical and epidemiological literature on caries prevalence reveals a ubiquitous pattern of worse oral heath among women than men. Research on cariogenesis shows that women's higher caries rates are influenced by changes in female sex hormones, the biochemical composition and flow rate of saliva, and food cravings and aversions during pregnancy. Significantly, the adoption of agriculture is associated with increased sedentism and fertility. I argue that the impact of dietary change on women's oral health was intensified by the increased demands on women's reproductive systems, including the increase in fertility, that accompanied the rise of agriculture and that these factors contribute to the observed gender differential in dental caries.

Archaeologists have documented more than 75 large, late pre-Columbian (ca. A.D. 1250–1600) Tewa villages, which represent more than 26,000 rooms, in northcentral New Mexico’s Tewa Basin. Researchers also have recognized expansive arrays of diverse agricultural fieldworks throughout this setting. Nonetheless, the number of rooms outstrips the basin’s agricultural potential. To cope with the unpredictability of farmland productivity, theTewas built, occupied, depopulated, and reoccupied their great villages within a system of short-term sedentism. To accommodate their need to maintain access to a broad land base and to sustain a sense of constancy within a milieu of continual change, the Tewas also used their village architecture to impose their agricultural rhythm on the landscape. In this process, the Tewas created a meaningful material record with which to sustain their occupancy of places where they resided and farmed intermittently.

Prompted by a recent article by Jiang and Liu in Antiquity (80, 2006), Dorian Fuller and his co-authors return to the question of rice cultivation and consider some of the difficulties involved in identifying the transition from wild to domesticated rice. Using data from Eastern China, they propose that, at least for the Lower Yangtze region, the advent of rice domestication around 4000 BC was preceded by a phase of pre-domestication cultivation that began around 5000 BC. This rice, together with other subsistence foods like nuts, acorns and waterchestnuts, was gathered by sedentary hunter-gatherer-foragers. The implications for sedentism and the spread of agriculture as a long term process are discussed.

As evidenced from the Korean archaeological record, there is an increased use of plant domesticates and a decrease in other food sources during the Holocene. These changes in overall human diet breadth culminate with the Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (c. 3500 B.P.) transition where dependence on hunted and gathered food packages decreases during the former period and full-scale agriculture becomes the norm during the latter cultural stage. This dietary shift appears to coincide with Holocene shoreline stabilization and overall large-scale population increase and movement through time. It is proposed here that two primary reasons exist for the change in overall diet breadth: (1) increasing shoreline stabilization during the Holocene and (2) an increase in hunter-gatherer population pressure due to a sedentary lifestyle. Both of these factors would have led to some degree of territorial circumscription, resulting in a progressive decline in overall hunter-gatherer foraging e‰ciency. In turn, this would have prompted the Holocene Korean Peninsular peoples to find other ways to offset their lowered overall foraging efficiency that had originally focused primarily on higher-ranked food resources (e.g., deer, wild boar). In this case, Korean peoples expanded their overall diet breadth to include a lower-ranked set of food packages (e.g., fish, shellfish) that by the advent of the Bronze Age eventually included plant domesticates regularly.

The relationship between food and war becomes increasingly complex with the growth and sophistication of the societies involved, notably with sedentary agricultural societies. Stored food not only alters the timing of offensive wars, but also makes that society an increasing target for others. But the logistical limits that define economic hinterlands necessarily affect warfare and limit the projection of force. Complex societies create strategies to overcome these limits, and the Aztec empire is the illustrative example here. Warfare can, and often does, result in the seizure of consumables of other societies. The benefits of this strategy, however, are limited and frequently overlooked. Moreover, the consequences of military expansion on both domestic and tributary production are similarly minimized. Food as a motive for military expansion is a limited motive in terms of the Aztec domestic economy. But it does provide material support for the military enterprise. This chapter focuses on the costs and benefits of military expansion on foodstuffs, what limits it, the consequences for domestic production, and the very real erosion of benefits that result for the commoners who comprise the vast majority of the population even in successful empires.

This chapter summarizes the archaeological evidence for the Neolithic and early food production across South Asia, with a focus on four major macro-regions with distinct chronological sequences, crop ecologies and cultural traditions. The four macro-regions are given by the northwest, including the greater Indus valley, the Gangetic plains, eastern India and savanna India. The earliest agriculture in South Asia can be found along the western tributaries of the Indus River, at aceramic settlements like Mehrgarh. Towards the middle Ganges plains there is clear evidence of a strongly indigenous Neolithic tradition, which included the development of rice cultivation and eventual sedentism. The nature of early Neolithic societies in eastern India has been less well studied than other parts of the subcontinent. However, there is a growing corpus of information from various streams of evidence available in the archaeological literature. The case for a truly independent origin of agriculture in South Asia is strongest in the southern peninsula of India.

While it has been suggested that malocclusion is linked with urbanisation, it remains unclear as to whether its high prevalence began 8,000 years earlier concomitant with the transition to agriculture. Here we investigate the extent to which patterns of affinity (i.e., among-population distances), based on mandibular form and dental dimensions, respectively, match across Epipalaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic samples from the Near East/Anatolia and Europe. Analyses were conducted using morphological distance matrices reflecting dental and mandibular form for the same 292 individuals across 21 archaeological populations. Thereafter, statistical analyses were undertaken on four sample aggregates defined on the basis of their subsistence strategy, geography, and chronology to test for potential differences in dental and mandibular form across and within groups. Results show a clear separation based on mandibular morphology between European hunter-gatherers, European farmers, and Near Eastern transitional farmers and semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers. In contrast, the dental dimensions show no such pattern and no clear association between the position of samples and their temporal or geographic attributes. Although later farming groups have, on average, smaller teeth and mandibles, shape analyses show that the mandibles of farmers are not simply size-reduced versions of earlier hunter-gatherer mandibles. Instead, it appears that mandibular form underwent a complex series of shape changes commensurate with the transition to agriculture that are not reflected in affinity patterns based on dental dimensions. In the case of hunter-gatherers there is a correlation between inter-individual mandibular and dental distances, suggesting an equilibrium between these two closely associated morphological units. However, in the case of semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers and farming groups, no such correlation was found, suggesting that the incongruity between dental and mandibular form began with the shift towards sedentism and agricultural subsistence practices in the core region of the Near East and Anatolia.