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Defensive structures have been applied as the permanent elements of the Iranian urbanism, from the first phases of sedentism in the Neolithic period onwards. Following the Iranian tradition in architecture, Sasanian fortifications having local features were constructed in adaptation with the regional circumstances. Nevertheless, we can find some similarities in the components of the defensive installations. The defensive structures located within the Sasanian territory turned Iran into the unconquerable fortress providing Sasanians with military, political, cultural, and economic dominance over a vast area of the ancient world for more than four centuries.

The transition from the dart to the arrow, and the commensurate changes in lithic technology is poorly understood in the American Southwest. This transition has often been linked to shifts in seden...

Author(s): Torres-Rouff, Christina; Pimentel, Gonzalo; Pestle, William J; Ugarte, Mariana; Knudson, Kelly J | Abstract: Camelid pastoralism, agriculture, sedentism, surplus production, increasing cultural complexity, and interregional interaction during northern Chile's Late Formative period (AD 100–400) are seen in the flow of goods and people over expanses of desert. Consolidating evidence of material culture from these interactions with a bioarchaeological dimension allows us to provide details about individual lives and patterns in the Late Formative more generally. Here, we integrate a variety of skeletal, chemical, and archaeological data to explore the life and death of a small child (Calate-3N.7). By taking a multiscalar approach, we present a narrative that considers not only the varied materiality that accompanies this child but also what the child's life experience was and how this reflects and shapes our understanding of the Late Formative period in northern Chile. This evidence hints at the profound mobility of their youth. The complex mortuary context reflects numerous interactions and long-distance relationships. Ultimately, the evidence speaks to deep social relations between two coastal groups, the Atacamenos and Tarapaquenos. Considering this suite of data, we can see a child whose life was spent moving through desert routes and perhaps also glimpse the construction of intercultural identity in the Formative period.

While sedentism is often thought to accompany farming, we demonstrate structured practices of subsistence and sociopolitical relations that enabled flexible, strategic mobility within a region. In these landscapes of strategic mobility, combining extensive cultivation with sociopolitical networks, Yucatec Maya people could move nimbly in order to evade any number of colonial depredations. Paying little heed to the anticipatory borders that emerging republics in Central America were aiming to establish, at the height of the Caste or Maya Social War of Yucatan (1847–1901), the San Pedro Maya used this strategic mobility to cross the Mexican boundary southward into areas occupied by British settlements in the Bay of Honduras to escape the war, and a decade later, across the putative border with Guatemala to escape West India regimental troops. In this chapter, we illustrate how these structured practices of strategic mobility developed over time and how, despite the military context, the San Pedro Maya should be seen not as “refugees” but as deft navigators within a familiar region. Finally, we discuss the implications for archaeology of trying to identify mobile farmers.

Against the Grain is an approachable book that explores the world of the earliest states, found in Mesopotamia. It is framed by the rationale that a study of the state's deep history might give us insight into contemporary concerns via an understanding of the deep causal links between sedentism, agriculture and state control.

Hafting is an important part of lithic technology that can increase our understanding of socioeconomic behavior in the past. In this article, we develop a holistic approach to studying hafting by using the concept of curation within a broader assessment of lithic technological organization in early villages. Early villages were loci of socioeconomic transformation as part of the shift from mobile foraging to more sedentary cultivation lifeways. We suggest that an examination of hafting can provide new insights into how early villagers negotiated technological requirements, economic decision making, and social interactions in these novel contexts. As a case study, we develop a curation index and apply it to an archaeological context of hafted and unhafted pointed tools from the early Neolithic village of Dhra’, Jordan. This curation index allows for a discussion of the technological, economic, and social dimensions of hafting strategies at Dhra’. The presence of multiple hafting traditions within early Neolithic villages of Southwest Asia is evidence of persistent social segmentation despite food storage and ritual practices that emphasized communal integration. Through the lens of lithic technological organization, we demonstrate that hafting and curation patterns can increase our understanding of technological, economic, and social strategies in early villages.

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...

Archaeobotanical remains recovered from a large ∼8000-year-old-shell midden (CA-SRI-666) on Santa Rosa Island provide the first ancient plant data from this large island, shedding light on ...

Are humans a domesticated species? How is this issue related to debates on the roles of human agency in human evolution? This article discusses four views on human domestication: (1) Darwin’s view; (2) the view of those who link human domestication to anthropogenic niche construction and, more specifically, to sedentism; (3) the view of those who link human domestication to selection against aggression and thedomestication syndrome; and (4) a novel view according to which human domestication can be conceived of in terms of a process ofpolitical selection. The article examines and compares these views to illustrate how discussions of human domestication can contribute to debates about how, and to what extent, human agency has affected human evolution.

Models in demographic ecology predict that populations in agrarian villages experience cycles of growth and decline as tied to relationships between founding population sizes, birth and mortality rates, habitat constraints, landscape productivity, and socio-economic practices. Such predictions should be equally applicable to fisher-hunter-gatherers. Intensive research at the Bridger River site on the Canadian Plateau has provided significant new insight into the dynamics of population growth and decline, subsistence productivity, cooperation, and development of social inequalities in material goods. In this paper, we present new evidence drawing from the fine-grained stratigraphic record of Housepit 54 to assess details regarding change in subsistence and technology as related to population and social dynamics. Results indicate a long and complex history characterized by two complete demographic cycles. Critically, the two subsistence downturns were managed using different tactics. Reduced local resources during the first period was likely managed with shorter stays in winter residences, somewhat more extensive use of the landscape, and continuation of egalitarian social relations. The second economic downturn followed a short-lived boom in resources and population growth that created extremely competitive social conditions. The subsequent downturn was managed by entrenched winter sedentism and likely social control of access to critical resources.

This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the adoption of farming and settled life in the Middle East can be enhanced by a consideration of the dependencies between humans and human-made things from the Late Glacial Maximum onwards. Often not considered in discussions of the origins of agriculture is the long process of human tooth size reduction that started in the Upper Palaeolithic and can reasonably be related to the increased use of grinding stones that created softer and more nutrient-rich plant foods. A consideration of the use of groundstone tools through the Epipalaeolithic and into the Neolithic shows that they were entangled with hearths, ovens, houses and settlements, exchange relations and notions of ownership. The practicalities of processing plants drew humans into pathways that led to intensification, population increase, sedentism and domestication. Much the same can be said for other human-made things such as sickles, storage bins, domestic animal dung and refuse. The dialectical tensions between human-thing dependence and dependency generated the movement towards Neolithicization. Human-thing dependence (involving human dependence on things, thing dependence on humans and thing dependence on other things) afforded opportunities towards which humans (always already in a given state of entanglement) were drawn in order to solve problems. But this dependence also involved dependency, limitation and constraint, leading for example to increases in labour. In order to provide that labour or in other ways to deal with the demands of things and their entanglements with other humans and things, humans made further use of the affordances of things. There was thus a generative spiral leading to sedentism and domestication.

Excavations at two Late Archaic shell rings on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, revealed evidence of significant amounts of subterranean storage. Based on botanical evidence, ethonographic analogies, and interpretations of other Late Archaic sites, hickory nuts and acorns are the most likely resource being stored, and quantifying the capacity found at each ring highlights the prevalence and importance of mast storage. These findings are important because large-scale storage has rarely been proposed for Late Archaic coastal peoples and, therefore, its impact as a potential factor for social changes enacted during this time period, including increasing sedentism, formalization of intragroup relations, and regionalization of cultural identities, has yet to be explored.

This chapter challenges historical and archaeological narratives that explain population mobility as a response to disorder and, conversely, sedentism as evidence of social stability. By juxtaposing nineteenth-century travellers’ journeys through southern African towns with twentieth-century archaeological research, King illustrates how models of human settlement within the past few centuries emphasise permanent dwelling as normal and movement as disrupted. King argues that these models preclude identifying mobile, politically complex ways of living, and demonstrates this through archaeological survey and excavation data from the southern Maloti-Drakensberg. The chapter demonstrates a need to consider movement, architecture, and politics as interrelated.

The shift from mobile hunting-gathering lifeways to sedentism has been frequently studied, and the Natufian culture is commonly recognized as the earliest sedentary society in the Levant. Historically, the remarkably rich Natufian material remains, combined with certain research biases, turned it into a “scene-stealer” in the Levantine Epipaleolithic sequence. However, data from earlier Epipaleolithic sites suggest a more complex scenario. Accordingly, we hypothesize an increase in occupation intensity even before the Natufian. The new excavations at Neve David (ND), a key site of the Middle Epipaleolithic Geometric Kebaran entity, located in Mount Carmel, enables us to test this by tracing variations in the lithic assemblage from a 185 cm deep section. Drawing upon the models of cultural transmission and technological organization, we employed six proxies: lithic volumetric density, burnt artifacts volumetric density, lithic fragmentation rate, microlith shape variation, relative frequency of bladelet cores, and tool/blank ratio. The first five proxies suggest that the settlement dynamics at ND are characterized by increasing occupation intensity through time. Overall, this case study sheds new light on the tempo and mode of evolution in land use strategies during the Middle Epipaleolithic, which is pivotal to better understanding the Neolithization processes in the Levant.

The goal of this contribution is to stimulate a wider reflection on the role of food consumption practices throughout prehistory. We focussed on the Jōmon communities of Hokkaidō Island in Northern Japan since these mobile foragers underwent a process of economic diversification and intensification, eventually leading to higher levels of sedentism across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Moreover, dynamic social settings and expansion of the subsistence base at the start of the Holocene would have provided rich opportunities for novelfood combinations, and potentially, the rise of diverse regional cuisines. We investigated tool kits and resource landscapes, and sampled pottery from a range of sites, phases and regions. We then applied organic residueanalysis to confirm the actual spatiotemporal patterning in cuisine. Although we predicted that ruminants and nuts would have played a major role in local cuisine, especially in inland areas, our results indicate that aquaticresources were central to pottery-based cuisines across the island, and that other food groups had probably been processed in other ways. While organic residue analysis enabled us to reconstruct some major patterns in Jōmoncuisine, we conclude that archaeologists will need to look “beyond the cooking pot” to fully appreciate the full diversity of local foodways.

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.

Northwest Mexico and West Mexico include four to five times as many named cultural areas equivalent to those known in the US Southwest, all with independent yet also connected histories. Together these changing cultures formed the bridge that connected the US Southwest with Mesoamerica. We review some aspects of regional diversity and moments of inter-regional relations, beginning with early agriculture and sedentism in the north. We trace the northward spread of rising regional centers and the appearance of some of the tangible elements of connection. This review shows that specialized production was more sparsely distributed than archaeologists once thought. Cultural identities were gained and lost; yet material connections persisted, and with the advances of past decades archaeologists can better characterize their occurrences, if not yet the mechanisms that produced those connections.

Three decades have passed since Keeley published his comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural variation in hunter-gatherer social complexity, sedentism, and storage across diverse environmental and demographic conditions (Keeley, L.H., 1988. Hunter-gatherer economic complexity and “population pressure”: A cross-cultural analysis. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 7, 373–411. https://doi.org/10.1016/0278-4165(88)90003-7). This article reconsiders Keeley’s work, shifting theoretical focus to niche construction, biocultural adaptation, and the biopolitics of inclusion and exclusion. In recent millennia, human niche construction has become defined by intense matter and energy extraction at or across key hydrospheric, atmospheric, and lithospheric regime boundaries. Associated global population growth has depended on the biocultural evolution of positive elasticity in energy extraction rates, with respect to labor inputs. This article presents a statistical reanalysis of Keeley’s cross-cultural data, documenting the niche-divergence between immediate-returns hunter-gatherers and delayed-returns, storage-dependent foragers. It is argued that the intricate relationships among niche elasticity, population-growth elasticity, niche diversification, and the biopolitics of inclusion and exclusion have dynamically shaped ecological enrichment—in the form of patch engineering—and demographic disruption—mainly in the form of dispersal, migration, raiding, and warfare. This article aims to offer new perspectives on the systemic coupling among political complexity, economic development, inequality, and environmental impacts in post-Pleistocene human systems.

Moseley’s (1975) Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization hypothesis challenges, in one of humanity’s few pristine hearths of civilization, the axiom that agriculture is necessary for the rise of complex societies. We revisit that hypothesis by setting new findings from La Yerba II (7571–6674 Cal bp) and III (6485–5893 Cal bp), Rio Ica estuary, alongside the wider archaeological record for the end of the Middle Preceramic Period on the Peruvian coast. The La Yerba record evinces increasing population, sedentism, and “Broad Spectrum Revolution” features, including early horticulture of Phaseolus and Canavalia beans. Yet unlike further north, these changes failed to presage the florescence of monumental civilization during the subsequent Late Preceramic Period. Instead, the south coast saw a profound “archaeological silence.” These contrasting trajectories had little to do with any relative differences in marine resources, but rather to restrictions on the terrestrial resources that determined a society’s capacity to intensify exploitation of those marine resources. We explain this apparent miscarriage of the Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (MFAC) hypothesis on the south coast of Peru by proposing more explicit links than hitherto, between the detailed technological aspects of marine exploitation using plant fibers to make fishing nets and the emergence of social complexity on the coast of Peru. Rather than because of any significant advantages in quality, it was the potential for increased quantities of production, inherent in the shift from gathered wild Asclepias bast fibers to cultivated cotton, that inadvertently precipitated revolutionary social change. Thereby refined, the MFAC hypothesis duly emerges more persuasive than ever.

Ethnoarchaeology is one of the most significant and lasting contributions developed by Lewis Binford as a mainstay of processual archaeology. Observations about the organization and use of space by contemporary groups are used as one method to investigate material patterns found in archaeological record. Ethnoarchaeological research by Graham (1989) among the Raramuri of northern Mexico generated models of residential site structure that operate at several spatial and organizational scales. Further ethnographic survey of groups who use subterranean dwellings was conducted by Schmader (1994) . Resulting expectations about residential mobility and site structure are presented. Excavations of ancestral puebloan pitstructures in central New Mexico by Schmader (1994) applied Graham’s models to explain patterning of interior floor assemblages. Distributions of floor items are used to identify activity areas and maintained interior space. Discussions concerning structure function, architectural responses to mobility, and inferences about varying degrees of site sedentism are presented. The potential and applicability of connecting ethnoarchaeological observations with archaeological patterns is described.

This paper offers a revised overview and model of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-gatherers in Italy, one that questions and extends existing materialist, evolutionary and ecological perspectives through an emphasis on the socio-cultural dynamics of mobility and place making. Particular attention is paid to selected caves and rock shelters, which gained an anchoring power through the repeated performance of mundane and ritual practices, but never to the point of immobile sedentism.

Why, when, and how people developed highly specialized marine economies remains the focus of considerable anthropological research. Study of maritime adaptations at high latitudes has potential to contribute to this debate because low biodiversity and increased resource seasonality at high latitudes made reliance on marine resources particularly risky. New research at the Cape Krusenstern site complex, located in northwest Alaska, offers a rare opportunity to study the evolution of maritime adaptations across the environmentally dynamic mid-to-late Holocene Arctic. Large-scale and systematic survey of this important site complex was undertaken to address questions about the timing and character of early Arctic coastal lifeways. Our research yielded direct dates of 4,200 years ago for the oldest occupation of the site complex and identified several new sites dating to between 4,200 and 2,000 years ago. Results support the existing settlement model, pointing to increased sedentism and local populati...

The Mesoamerican Formative period (1600 bce–ce 250) saw the establishment of sedentism, dietary transformations and the development of ceramic technologies for subsistence, artistic representation and the region’s earliest preserved musical instruments. These instruments include aerophones such as whistles, ocarinas and flutes. In this paper, we describe sixty-three ceramic aerophones from mostly Formative period contexts in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. We situate our analysis in the broader contexts of research on music and iconography in Mesoamerican archaeology, as well as of the anthropology of sensory perception. Through a consideration of archaeological context, artifact form and technical properties, we conclude that music was used in a wide range of social settings and carried multivalent meanings in ancient coastal Oaxaca. Specifically, we argue that instruments acted in both public and private settings, and that the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic imagery they bear indicates complex social pra...

The growth and decline of large village communities is a topic of considerable interest for archaeologists studying the development of complex regional polities. In this article, demographic information is presented for the transitional Mississippian period Washausen mound center located in the American Bottom region of west-central Illinois. Population estimates are calculated based on data for residential architecture collected in 2011 during an extensive geophysical survey and excavations at the site. A magnetometer survey was conducted over 8 ha and produced a relatively complete site map revealing numerous household clusters organized around a central, earthen mound-and-plaza complex. Population estimates and site spatial information for Washausen are compared with similar data for earlier village communities located nearby, as well as other global village sequences, producing a demographic profile demonstrating a pattern of village growth and decline in the area after the onset of sedentism and agricultural intensification. Information from the region and elsewhere suggests that the development of larger communities through time resulted in part through frequent population movements as village segments fissioned and aggregated to form new communities. This research finding has the potential to inform models for the growth of much larger American Bottom centers such as Pulcher and Cahokia.

Within the Near Eastern research canon, the transition to more sedentary lifestyles during the Neolithic is often framed as an economic necessity, linked to plant and animal domestication, climatic change and population stress. In such a framework, an increasingly complex social structure, arising in response to the increasingly complex relations of agricultural production, is presumed. For example, some researchers would argue that feasting-based rituals became an arena of social control and an increasingly complex society began to emerge around ritual leadership and monumental ritual architecture. Yet the research projects conducted at many Near Eastern sites indicate neither that sedentism can be directly linked to the requirements of agriculture, nor that the presence of monumental architecture can be successfully associated with social control based on unequal redistribution of agricultural surplus. While ritual activity appears to be central during the Neolithic, two important questions remain to be explored: (1) what exactly did the rituals control, given that the societies under consideration are commonly perceived to have an ‘egalitarian’ ethos?; and (2) what happened to the ritual control in the second half of the PPNB, when ritual architecture completely disappears from the archaeological record at a time of increased reliance on agriculture? Through a critical review of the use of terms like ‘sedentism’, ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘ritual’, I argue that the architecture of the Early Neolithic is related to the management of social relationships through symbolic place-making activities. Based on a comparative review of burial activity, building continuity and the use of symbolic imagery, I examine the symbolic construction of some of the earliest examples of long-term occupational focus in southeast Anatolia, such as Hallan Cemi, Demirkoy, Kortik Tepe, Hasankeyf Hoyuk, Gusir Hoyuk, Gobekli Tepe, Cayonu and Nevali Cori, in an attempt to understand the social factors behind the emergence and demise of Early Neolithic monumental architecture. The evidence from the above-mentioned sites suggests that Early Neolithic place-making reflects community formation at a variety of scales, at the center of which lay the continuous reinvention of kinship concepts. While some sites, with concentrations of burials, may have become the locus for construction of more intimate local place-based networks, other sites, such as Gobekli Tepe, may have integrated the extended networks. Arguably, the formation of large scale networks during the PPNA posed a threat to local groups. Thus, a focus on local group formation and close control of social exchanges may have begun during the early PPNB, and the places such as Gobekli Tepe may have fallen out of use during this process. In the context of the symbolism and figurine evidence, I further argue that sex and gender may have become important issues, both in the formation of place-communities during the late PPNA—early PPNB, and in the emergence of autonomous households during the later PPNB.

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.

The various (s)cenes of Anthropocene discourse are attempts to conceptualize the problem of anthropogenic global warming and to better understand the problem with a view to possible solutions. This paper explores, in a series of theoretic vignettes, ways that these attempts are too myopic and narrow, and tend to ignore the possibility that the most fundamental levels of social organization might be the very conditions under which other &lsquo, cenes&rsquo, can function at all. Specifically, Jason Moore&rsquo, s Capitalocene describes and explains many symptoms of a world enraptured by capital. However, the beginning of the Holocene marks an historical stage wherein humans changed their thoughts and behaviours in such a way as to make something like capitalism possible at all. The dualism that Moore cites as fundamental to the Capitalocene did not begin with Descartes, it began with anatomically modern humans circa 10,000 years ago.

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.

WOS: 000330167700006, This paper discusses the only substantive evidence for the Epipalaeolithic of central Anatolia. This evidence allows revised understandings of phenomena often proposed as characteristic of the Epipalaeolithic of South-west Asia including the appearance of sedentism, a putative Broad Spectrum Revolution, intensive plant exploitation and the emergence of distinctive ritual and symbolic practices. It also allows further evaluation of the effect of Late Glacial climate change on human behaviours.

In the early seventh millennium BC an expansion of the Neolithic economy and sedentism took place in Asia Minor. This occurred nearly two millennia after the emergence of Neolithic societies in southern central Anatolia, which raises the question of how this expansion occurred, and why it came about at this particular moment. This paper considers various elements that might have played a role in this expansion episode, such as climate change, demography, and agricultural and social changes.

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...

In the ancient American Southwest, use of the bow developed relatively rapidly among Pueblo people by the fifth century AD. This new technology replaced the millennia-old atlatl and dart weaponry system. Roughly 150 years later in the AD 600s, Pueblo socioeconomic organization began to evolve rapidly, as many groups adopted a much more sedentary life. Multiple factors converged to allow this sedentary pattern to emerge, but the role of the bow in this process has not been fully explored. In this paper, we trace the development of the bow and discuss its role as sedentism emerged and social changes occurred in ancient Puebloan society from the fifth through seventh centuries AD.

After a brief parallel presentation of the development of the Upper Paleolithic cultures in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the Near East we propose a new paradigm for the issue of the process, that is to say, the birth of Neolithization. Instead of a sudden appareance within a few centuries around 9000 BP, we think that the phenomenon is the result of a long and chaotic story which began independently in both continents more than 35,000 years ago. After many attempts which failed one after the other due to the severe and repeated climatic fl uctuations at the end of the Pleistocene and/ or due to the lack of ‘ understanding’ vegetal and animal species which were ‘ ready’ to ‘ accept’ domestication, the success arrived in very precise environmental and climatic conditions at the beginning of the Holocene in only one of the two regions, the Near East. If Neolithization doesn’t appear earlier it’s not because ‘ culture’ was not ready, but because ‘ nature’ was not able to give a favourable answer to the request of man., Après une brève mise en parallèle du développement des cultures du Paléolithique supérieur en Europe centrale et orientale ainsi qu’au Proche-Orient, nous proposons un nouveau modèle de l’achèvement de ce processus, c’est-à-dire l’apparition de la néolithisation. Plutôt que d’admettre une apparition soudaine en quelques siècles autour de 9000 BP, nous pensons que ce phénomène est l’aboutissement d’une histoire longue et chaotique commencée de manière indépendante sur les deux continents il y a plus de 35 000 ans. Après plusieurs tentatives qui ont échoué à la suite de fluctuations climatiques sévères et répétées à la fi n du Pleistocène, et/ ou à la suite du «refus » de certaines espèces végétales ou animales de se laisser alors domestiquer, le succès s’est produit dans des circonstances environnementales et climatiques précises au début de l’Holocène dans l’une des deux régions seulement, le Proche-Orient. Si la néolithisation n’est pas apparue plus tôt, ce n’est pas parce que la ‘ culture’ n’était pas prête, mais parce que la ‘ nature’ n’était pas en mesure de donner une réponse favorable à la demande de l’homme., Aurenche Olivier, Kozlowski J., Kozlowski Stefan Karol. To be or not to be… Neolithic: “Failed attempts” at Neolithization in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Near East, and their final success (35,000-7000 BP). In: Paléorient, 2013, vol. 39, n°2. pp. 5-45.

The origins and spread of Neolithic life-ways represent a pivotal change in human ecology and society. Communities transformed their relationships with the world around them, shifting away from reliance upon hunted and collected wild resources, to the management and domestication of plants and animals, alongside a pattern of increasing sedentism. These processes were played out at differing temporal and spatial scales; from the life-cycle of a single organism of a population on the path to domestication, to the dissemination of ‘new’ farming economies around the world. The varied fields within environmental archaeology are providing an increasingly detailed understanding of the agencies, processes and pathways in these transformations. These include work in the established fields of geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology and archaeobotany (Bendrey et al. 2013). In recent

This chapter focuses on theoretical issues of hunter-gatherer violence and warfare. Many of the comprehensive works summarizing indigenous warfare and violence consider some hunter-gatherer societies, but have not emphasized the distinction between forager societies and farmers. While more complex hunter-gatherer groups with greater sedentism, storage, organizational capacity, and population density are routinely acknowledged as having considerable violence and war. There continues to be a widely held belief that less complex, mobile foragers conform with the ideal of the noble savage, at least in regard to their proclivity for intergroup conflict. The lack of attention to conflict within the full range of hunter-gatherer adaptations is all the more curious since it is a potential key to the heavily debated questions of when and why war originated. The most influential long-chronology archaeologists are Keeley and Steven LeBlanc. LeBlancs treatise on warfare in the American southwest is perhaps the most detailed study of the evidence for prehistoric warfare in one particular cultural area.

This study revisits an earlier publication in this journal (Wills and Windes 1989) in which a settlement model involving seasonal mobility and limited household autonomy was outlined for Shabik’eschee Village, a Basketmaker III period (ca. A.D. 400–750) site in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. We return to that work for three reasons. First, the original interpretation has been challenged and an alternative view offered in the form of a large sedentary village. Second, the issue of Basketmaker III sedentism is central to recent efforts to identify and understand a Neolithic Demographic Transition in the northern Southwest. And third, we have obtained new field data from Shabik’eschee and Chaco that contributes to this debate. We conclude that our understanding of Shabik’ eschee’s history is improved by both new data and the ongoing consideration of alternative models, but the site does not contain evidence for a sedentary village.

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]

Preface Colin Renfrew, Michael J. Boyd and Iain Morley 1. 'The unanswered question': investigating early conceptualisations of death Colin Renfrew Part I. Intimations of Mortality: 2. Non-human animal responses towards the dead and death: a comparative approach to understanding the evolution of human mortuary practices Alex Piel and Fiona Stewart 3. Lower and Middle Palaeolithic mortuary behaviours and the origins of ritual burial Joao Zilhao 4. Upper Palaeolithic mortuary practices: reflection of ethnic affiliation, social complexity and cultural turn-over Francesco d'Errico and Marian Vanhaeren Part II. Mortality and the Foundations of Human Society: Sedentism and the Collective: 5. Gathering of the dead? The Early Neolithic sanctuaries of Goebekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey Jens Notroff, Oliver Dietrich and Klaus Schmidt 6. Death and architecture: the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A burials at WF16, Wadi Faynan, Southern Jordan Steven Mithen, Bill Finlayson, Darko Maricevic, Sam Smith, Emma Jenkins and Mohammad Najjar 7. Corporealities of death in the central Andes (c.9000-2000 BC) Peter Kaulicke 8. Mediating the dominion of death in Prehistoric Malta Simon Stoddart 9. House societies and founding ancestors in Early Neolithic Britain Julian Thomas Part III. Constructing the Ancestors: 10. Constructing ancestors in Sub-Saharan Africa Timothy Insoll 11. Different kinds of dead: presencing Andean expired beings George F. Lau 12. Putting death in its place: the idea of the cemetery Anthony Snodgrass 13. Becoming Mycenaean? The living, the dead and the ancestors in the transformation of society in second millennium BC southern Greece Michael J. Boyd Part IV. Death, Hierarchy and the Social Order: 14. Life and death in late-prehistoric to early historic Mesopotamia Karina Croucher 15. The big sleep: early Maya mortuary ritual Norman Hammond 16. De-paradoxisation of paradoxes by referring to death as an ultimate paradox: the case of the state-formation phase of Japan Koji Mizoguchi 17. Death and mortuary rituals in mainland southeast Asia: from hunter-gatherers to the god kings of Angkor Charles F. W. Higham Part V. Materiality and Memory: 18. How did the Mycenaeans remember? Death, matter and memory in the early Mycenaean world Lambros Malafouris 19. Eternal glory: the origins of eastern jade burial and its far-reaching influence Li Shuicheng 20. Eventful deaths - eventful lives? Bronze age mortuary practices in the late prehistoric Eurasian steppes of central Russia (2100-1500 BC) Bryan Hanks, Roger Doonan, Derek Pitman, Elena Kupriyanova and Dmitri Zdanovich Part VI. Intimations of Immortality: Glimpsing Other Worlds: 21. Northern Iroquoian deathways and the re-imagination of community John L. Creese 22. Locating a sense of immortality in early Egyptian cemeteries Alice Stevenson 23. Buddhist mortuary traditions in ancient India: stupas, relics and the Buddhist landscape Julia Shaw 24. Killing mummies: on Inka epistemology and imperial power Terence N. D'Altroy Part VII. Responses and Reactions: Concluding Thoughts: 25. Death shall have no dominion: a response Timothy Jenkins 26. Comments: death shall have no dominion Paul Wason 27. The muse of archaeology Ben Okri.

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.

Understanding of European prehistoric storage practices tends to focus on the long-term and large-scale storage of cereals from the Neolithic onwards. In addition, storage is often associated with the development of sedentism and social complexity. Through the use of anthropological and ethnographic data this paper demonstrates that storage by both hunter–gatherers and farmers is more complex. New storage categories, such as closed and open caches, and portable storage, are suggested as ways of understanding whether similar storage practices were used during European prehistory. We learn that although direct evidence for storage is difficult to find in the archaeological record, a combination of ethnographic data and indirect evidence demonstrates that storage, especially this use of small-scale storage, was practiced in prehistory. In the conclusion, this paper demonstrates that storage during the Mesolithic (11,300–6000 BP) would have played a vital role in the lifeways of hunter–gatherers and that for the Neolithic (6000–4500 BP) the use of small-scale storage of a variety of foods would have been equally important as the storage of grain.

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 Pequot War (1636-38) in southern New England has never lacked for scholarly attention. Historians agree that the violent conflict is an important subject of study because the English victory over the Pequots secured the foothold of the fledgling Puritan colonies in eastern North America. The Pequot War is also notorious and controversial because of the deliberate English torching of one of the two main Pequot villages, which burned hundreds of indigenous women and children alive. Some scholars have noted that it was one of the first Indian wars in North America in which the European colonizers effectively manipulated the existing rivalries among the indigenous peoples. During the war the English secured military support from the Narragansetts and the Mohegans, two indigenous peoples who were eager to strike a major blow against their Pequot neighbors. Finally, some historians such as Alfred Cave view the Pequot War as one of "the earliest expressions of the idea that Indian wars were providentially ordained events intended to test and chastise God's people."1One group usually left out in studies of the Pequot War are the Dutch. The Pequot War is typically perceived as a binary conflict between the English and the Pequots. Studies of the war do acknowledge the trade alliance between the Dutch and the Pequots in the preceding decade, but they shift their full attention to English-Pequot relations after the sudden unraveling of the Dutch-Pequot alliance in 1633-34.2 To some extent the stereotypical image of the Dutch as traders rather than as colonizers has also contributed to their neglect in historical studies of the Pequot War. For example, in a recent study of Dutch-indigenous encounters in New Netherland, Donna Merwick contrasted Dutch maritime trade with English setder colonialism in southern New England. In this view, whereas the Dutch wanted only to trade with the Pequots, the English were land-hungry setders determined to drive the Pequots from their territories. Although Merwick's distinction between Dutch and English policies in southern New England is useful, it is also simplistic and does not help us understand why Pequot-Dutch relations developed as they did.3 A challenge to this understanding is the scarcity of Dutch sources for this period. The years from 1645 to the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664 are well documented, but we have only a few written Dutch sources for the 1620s and 1630s. It is nevertheless possible to reconstruct Dutch actions before and during the Pequot War. By highlighting the role of the Dutch, this essay seeks to complicate our view of the Pequot War as an inevitable conflict between the Puritans and the Pequots.THE NINNIMISSIINUOK OF SOUTHERN NEW ENGLANDThe coast of southern New England between the Housatonic River and Buzzard's Bay was one of the most densely populated areas north of Mexico before European contact. The maritime and estuary environment attracted and sustained a great variety of sea life, birds, fowl, shellfish, and land animals that made possible a "regionally based sedentism" for indigenous peoples.4 In contrast to peoples located inland, who lived in large sedentary villages surrounded by agricultural fields, the peoples of the coastal zone lived in small, semi- sedentary communities whose territories were usually centered on an estuary. The year-round availability of abundant food sources in relatively small areas fostered the emergence of densely populated areas and the development of multiple polities with a strong sense of territoriality. The main indigenous polities of southern New England were the Paugusetts, Pequots, Mohegans, Niantics, Narragansetts, and Pokanokets. They were linguistically and culturally closely affiliated with peoples on eastern Long Island such as the Montauks, Shinnecocks, and Unquachogs. All these polities spoke a variety of the Eastern Algonquian language, were closely connected through kinship and intermarriage, and shared many similar cultural practices. …

Mobility is an important part of life for those who practice a variety of economic strategies including foraging, pastoralism, craft production, service provision, and performance. Studies of mobility can contribute to broader understandings of social networks, community formation, and social identity in South Asia during the first few millennia b.c ., a time of early social complexity. Previous ethnographic and archaeological research in the region shows a range of ways that mobile people form relationships with those who are more settled. In contrast to research that studies mobile people through the lens of sedentism, this study examines mobility directly, by focusing on the direction, range, and patterns of movement of the people who inhabited the site of Bagor (c. 5500 b.c. –a.d . 200) in Rajasthan, India. For much of its occupation, Bagor was used as a temporary camp by people with a high degree of mobility and a broad range of subsistence strategies. Although the links between Bagor and nearby permanent settlements have been clearly demonstrated, the direction, extent, and range of their movements during different time periods was previously unknown. This study examines the lithic raw materials from the 2001 re-excavations conducted by Deccan College (Pune) and pairs those results with a new survey of stone material sources in the region. Visual raw material analysis of the Bagor lithics indicate that local materials outnumber non-local materials and that approximately one-third of the Bagor chert artifacts may have come from regions to the south and southeast. In later time periods the use of non-local materials declines, which may reflect corresponding shifts in mobility. A comparison of the raw material distribution with the artifacts from Gilund, a contemporary sedentary settlement, shows a difference between their uses of raw material. Gilund utilized more local materials, and fewer non-local materials than Bagor.

Ancient Costa Ricans in the Arenal area exhibited extraordinary persistence in landscape use and social memory, in spite of repeated catastrophes caused by explosive volcanic eruptions. The Canales village on the south shore of Lake Arenal was struck by two large explosive eruptions during the Arenal phase (500 b.c.–a.d. 600). Following ecological recovery, the village was reoccupied after each of these eruptions. I argue that the people who reoccupied the village were direct descendants of pre-disaster villagers due to the fact that they reinstated use of the same path to the village cemetery. While previous interpretations emphasized ecological reasons for village reoccupation, I suggest that a dominating reason for reoccupation was to re-establish contact with the spirits of deceased ancestors in the cemetery. The living and the spirits of the deceased constituted the functioning community. The refugees re-established processional access to their cemetery as soon as possible, perhaps even before the village was reoccupied. Archaeologists rarely discover evidence of ancient pilgrimages. However, the combination of remote sensing and detailed stratigraphic analyses allow them to be detected in the Arenal area. Villagers created and perpetuated social memory by regular linear ritual processions along precisely the same path, in spite of challenging topography and occasional regional disasters obscuring the path. This recognition has implications for the arguments of sedentism versus residential mobility during the Arenal phase. The exploration of ancient landscapes and memory has challenged and excited archaeologists in recent years. Layton and Ucko (1999) summarize the range of conceptualization of landscape from the phenomenological emphasis on natural setting to the ideational emphasis on perception, meaning, and belief. Likewise, Ashmore and Knapp (1999) explore the conceptualized and constructed aspects of ancient landscapes. I view the range of landscape conceptualization as encompassing scientific (physical and social science) through humanistic approaches, although archaeological emphasis has shifted recently from the former more toward the latter (Ashmore and Knapp 1999). It is this upsurge of humanistic approaches in archaeology that emphasizes the affective, perceptual, and experiential dimensions of landscape. Yet I agree with Layton and Ucko (1999) thatemployingthefullrangeofscholarshipfromsciencetohumanism can be very useful. Thus we can see the landscape as environment, and paying attention to topography, rainforest resources, soils, water, and sources for stone tools, while seeing the landscape as social space, paying attention to repeated activities that become deeply embedded in social memory. Humanistic insights, ideas, and speculations can generate controversy, often leading to testable hypotheses and further research.