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Hunter–gatherer societies, traditionally, have been regarded as representing the ‘original’ human society—that is, preagricultural peoples, reliant upon ‘wild’ foods and ‘natural’ landscapes. From a sociological perspective, hunter–gatherers emerged as the ‘precapitalist’ base-line in Marx's evolutionary framework. From a biological viewpoint, Darwin envisaged them as the human ‘prototype.’ Recent changes in focus have redefined hunter–gatherers as incorporating a much wider range in sociocultural variation. Narrower, more traditional, definitions had emphasised: a small scale, mobile and egalitarian society; low population size and densities; lack of surplus (and storage); and limited impact upon land and resources. In contrast, recent revision considers that hunter–gatherers also incorporated: more complex social formations, including ‘chiefdoms’ and the ‘state’; high levels of sedentism; large population sizes and densities; significant levels of surplus and storage; extensive social networks; and had considerable impact upon land and resources. Hunter–gatherers, therefore, overlap markedly with other societies, including agriculturalists. Archaeological examples of the historical evolution of these features of hunter–gatherer society can be found in the following time periods and regions: Eurasian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic; North American Archaic; preagricultural Mesoamerica and Peru; and late Holocene Australia. While many of these features may be difficult to explore archaeologically, they have largely ‘revolutionized’ our perceptions of the way human society developed.

In history, nomads/nomadism have always been regarded as a by-product of the cultural evolution of sedentary farmers and as a permanent threat. They were considered primitive, backward, and incapable of improving their living situation. Only the transition to a settled life and a sedentary economy (sedentism) was considered to be a meaningful alternative. However, according to current ethno-archeological and socio-geographical research nomadism should rather be considered an independent mode of culture practised by inhabitants of the Old World dry belt. In response to ecological/natural and social/political conditions, they have developed an optimal form of safeguarding survival by using pasture animals and adopting a mobile way of life. Given the right conditions, nomadism—here termed a ‘socio-ecological mode of culture—was able to appear or disappear at any place and any time. As the article shows, this ‘appearance’ and ‘disappearance’ of the nomads runs through the entire history of the Old World dry belt. Seen in this way, nomadism as a socio-ecological mode of culture represents an independent constitutive element of society within the Old World dry belt.

Changes in the organization of production are associated with significant historical transitions such as the development of food production, settlement aggregation and sedentism, the institutionalization of social and other inequalities, occupational specialization, urbanization, exchange, the production of surpluses, and the development of markets. Understanding production in terms of its constituent processes has thus been critical. Two of these processes, the intensification and specialization of production, lie at the heart of many of these transitions and are used to characterize the level of effort, productivity, land and labor use, and degree of skill in agricultural production and craft or artifact production.

Esta ponencia hace referencia al patrón mortuorio Acha del Arcaico Temprano, precedente del patrón mortuorio Chinchorro. Se hace mención a sus referentes culturales que lo contextualizan como componente de una sociedad pescadora - recolectora, semi sedentaria y con una economía basada en la explotación complementaria de recursos costeros y de valle This presentation makes reference to the Acha mortuary pattern of the Early Archaic, preceding the Chinchorro mortuary pattern. It makes mention of the cultural references that contextualize it as a component of a semi-sedentary, hunter-gatherer society with an economy based on the complementary exploitation of coastal and valley resources

The quantity and nutritional quality of food available to human populations undoubtedly played a major role in the adaptive processes associated with human evolution. This should have been particularly the case in that period of human history from Mesolithic times to the present when epochal changes took place in the subsistence base of many human societies. In the Near East the domestication of plants and animals began toward the end of the Mesolithic period but became fully developed in the Neolithic. This development included agriculture and pastoralism along with cultural changes associated with greater sedentism and urbanism. Paleopathology, primarily through the study of human skeletal remains, has attempted to interpret the impact such changes have had upon human health. A recent focus has been on the transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to one associated with incipient or fully developed agriculture (e. g., Cohen and Armelagos 1984b; Cohen 1989; Meiklejohn and Zvelebil 1991). One of the questions being asked is whether greater dependence on fewer food sources increased human vulnerability to famine and malnutrition. The later transition into an increasingly sedentary urban existence in the Bronze and Iron Ages has not been as carefully studied. However, analysis of data from skeletal remains in numerous archaeological sites is providing insight into some of the effects upon nutrition that increasing human density and attendant subsistence changes have had. In the study of prehistoric health, perhaps the least complex nutritional data comes from human remains that have been mummified. Preservation of human soft tissues occurs either naturally, as in the bogs of northern Europe and very arid areas of the world, or through cultural intervention with embalming methods. Some mummies have provided direct evidence of diet from the intestinal contents of their stomachs (e.g., Glob 1971: 42–3; Fischer 1980: 185–9; Brothwell 1986: 92). However, the most ubiquitous source of data comes from human skeletal remains where the impact of dietary factors tends to be indirect, limited, and difficult to interpret.

Wyncoll Greg, Tangri Daniel. The Origins of Commensalism and Human Sedentism. In: Paleorient, 1991, vol. 17, n°2. pp. 157-159.

Archaeological evidence for Amerindian ancestors' migration through the Arctic is sketchy. There is still argument over the details of chronology and route, but it is clear that the human career in America is an extension of Eurasian Upper Paleolithic lifeways. If people lived in America before 12,000 years ago, their remains have become extremely scarce and nearly impossible to authenticate. This chapter examines evidence about supposed very early populations known under the rubrics of pre-Paleoindian, pre-Clovis, or pre-projectile-point populations. From the beginning, many of the proponents of a South American Paleolithic stage have been European archaeologists, amateur or professional, who modeled their expectations on the Old World paleolithic sequence and relied principally on archaeological indications. Sedentism and village formation occurred at the end of the Archaic and have been seen, in most of the world, as correlates of agriculture and harbingers of a Formative stage, in which class structure and civilization emerge.

The use of teeth in anthropological analyses has always provided valuable information on the subsistence patterns of human communities, as well as the biological relationships among them. The present study analyses the permanent dentition of several diachronically continuing samples from the Trentino alpine region of Italy from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. The study of both metric and non-metric dental traits show a strong level of homogeneity from the earlier to the later samples, indicating little external biological influence from surrounding areas. However, the evidence of oral pathology and linear enamel hypoplasia highlights a trend of increase in defects, particularly between the Neolithic and the Copper Age. This has been ascribed to a shift towards more intense agricultural activities and pastoralism, that led to a change in diet and to an increased sedentism. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

communities. However, her assessment (pp. 703-704, 709) that this information is at odds with my (1987) analysis of violence in simple human societies is curious; if anything, her material supports my analysis quite convincingly. By contrast, her assessment that centralized leadership is necessary to quell disturbance and that "sedentary societies cannot exist without formal centralized leadership at some level, be it internal or external" (p. 708) appears questionable. Kent here assumes the functionality of political legitimacy and superordinate control, as is perhaps also reflected in her choice of "Basarwa" as an ethnic designation. (Wilmsen [1989:278] states that "Zhu do not refer to themselves as Basarwa, except when they decry their downtrodden state.") The Kutse group described by Kent seems to be in the incipient stages of developing adult male status differentiations analogous to those of other sedentary San, as documented by Cashdan (1980), and the types of fighting Kent describes seem to be part of this process. Kent herself emphasizes the role of one man as organizer of the public beating she discusses and she states, "I believe he took the responsibility in an attempt to achieve a leadership position" (p. 707). This is quite consistent with my notion (Knauft 1987:479) that a more overt and chronically aggressive ethos develops as adult male status rivalries become prominent and politically foregrounded, for example, in disputes over material possessions and leadership rights in the context of sedentism. Far from lumping such violence with that in more politically decentralized nomadic foragers, as Kent (pp. 703, 709) suggests, I was particularly concerned to contrast the dynamics of violence in such different conditions.

Elliot Fratkin and Eric Abella Roth, eds. As Pastoralists Settle: Social, Health, and Economic Consequences of Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Kenya. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005. x + 280 pp. Photographs. Maps. Figures. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $89.95. Cloth. As Pastoralists Settle launches a new series by Kluwer dedicated to studies of human-environmental dynamics and modeled after the journal Human Ecology. Elliot Fratkin, a cultural anthropologist, and Eric Abella Roth, a demographic anthropologist, lead this collaborative effort as the book's editors and chief contributors. Together with Martha A. Nathan, they have conducted longitudinal research on "bio-social concomitants of sedentism" (3) among Rendille and Ariaal pastoralists in Marsabit District, Kenya. Thirteen chapters describe this research, along with that conducted by other contributors with expertise in northern Kenyan pastoral studies: Bettina Shell-Duncan and Masako Fujita (biological anthropology); John Galaty, Peter Little, and Kevin Smith (social anthropology); H. Jurgen Schwartz (veterinary biology); John McPeak (economics); Wario Adano and Karen Witsenburg (geography); Leunita Auko Muruli, Elizabeth Ngugi, and Walter Obungu Obiero (public health); David Wiseman (medicine); and Joan Harris (nursing). Although the book focuses on five Rendille and Ariaal communities, some chapters include other pastoral and/or neighboring groups. The opening three chapters provide a general context for the historical fact that pastoralists throughout East Africa and elsewhere have become increasingly sedentary. They include summaries of the expected: population growth, drought and famine (as well as external aid responses to such conditions), loss of common property resources, commoditization, urban migration, "ethnic clashes," political turmoil, civil war, and state intervention. McPeak and Little note that processes of sedentarization have been ongoing for the past two millennia in semi-arid and arid regions (87), while Galaty paraphrases Ibn Khaldun's six-hundred-year-old lamentation about the decline of nomadic life and the "morality, fortitude, and social cohesiveness undermined by the inexorable change... to sedentary life" (53). In sum, sedentarization of pastoralists is by no means a new phenomenon or necessarily a desired moral evolution. But, as the authors rightfully claim, moving into town is not necessarily a lasting commitment or an antipastoral one, either. This latter point complements the book's major theme: people living in households engaged to some degree in nomadic livestock herding realize greater nutritional and health benefits, on average, than those in the study's settled communities. It should be noted, however, that many of the study's town dwellers ended up settled near mission and NGO-founded centers because of livestock loss due to drought, disease, and/or raiding. Thus, many of the informants were poor when they settled and were, in effect, partially subsidized by those missions and NGOs. Still, the authors demonstrate, living in towns can lead to increased opportunities in schoolbased education, wage employment, crop-based food security, and possibly gender equity. …

At the eve of the Epipaleolithic an irreversible transformation look place in the southern Levant from small nomadic bands of an ephemeral nature and high residential mobility into a sedentary social organization, while acquiring new properties such as labor division, intergroup identification and wide usage of storage facilities. The abrupt replacement of many small Geometric Kebaran seasonal sites with a few relatively large long-term Natufian habitations emerged, without traces of intermediate stages. This phenomenon is perhaps the most astonishing example of an increase in the level of complexity of social organization manifested throughout human history. It is argued, that the main socio-economic transformations in human evolution were basically detached from the impact of the environment, at least since the Upper Paleolithic, and may be explained, by the same basic innate self-organization properties that extend from DNA molecules to biosocialization. No causal and temporal, matching between the local cultural changes and. the global climatic events can be inferred, in particular during the abrupt shift to sedentisn in the early Natufian. and the transformation to incipient domestication during the PPNB. The cohesiveness of the southern Levantine paleo- communities lasted uninterruptedly from early Natufian to late PPNB. during which the Southwest Asian arid belt supported a. rich diversity of Palearctic species, relicts of which still occupy the mountainous region of this areas. It is argued that the southern Levantine climatic oscillations cannot he directly correlated, with the ecological, and physiological behavior of organisms ; certainly not with that late humans., Vers la fin de l'Epipaléolithique au Levant sud, une transformation irréversible se produisit : des nomades organisés en petits groupes éphémères et très mobiles s'organisèrent en sociétés sédentaires loin en acquérant, de nouveaux caractères tels que la, division, du travail, des identities communes à plusieurs groupes et l'utilisation généralisée de structures de stockage. Le remplacement soudain de nombreux petits sites kébariens saisonniers par un nombre peu élevé de grandes maisons permanentes au Natoufien s'est effectué sans stades intermédiaires. Le phénomène d'accroissement du degré de complexité de l'organisation, sociale est sans doute l'exemple le plus étonnant dans l'histoire humaine. L'hypothèse avancée est que. au moins depuis le Paléolithique supérieur, les principales transformations socio-économiques dans l'évolution humaine devinrent alors indépendantes de l'impact de l'environnement et qu'elles s'expliquent par les mêmes propriétés innées d'organisation qui caractérisent les molécules d'ADN jusqu'à la biosocialisation. Aucun lien de cause a effet ou chronologique entre les changements culturels locaux et les événements climatiques globaux ne peut être mis en évidence pendant l'apparition soudaine de la vie sédentaire au Natoufien ancien et les débuts de la domestication au cours du PPNB. La cohésion des premières communautés du Levant sud se manifeste sans interruption du Natoufien ancien au PPNB récent alors que la ceinture aride du Sud-Ouest asiatique pouvait maintenir une riche variété d'espèces paléoarctiques dont les restes occupent encore la zone montagneuse de ces régions. Ainsi les oscillations climatiques du Levant-Sud ne peuvent-elles être directement liées au comportement écologique et physiologique des organismes et certainement pas avec ceux des Hommes à cette époque., Tchernov Eitan. Are Late Pleistocene Environmental Factors, Faunal Changes and Cultural Transformations causally connected ? The case of the Southern Levant.. In: Paléorient, 1997, vol. 23, n°2. Paléoenvironnement et sociétés humaines au moyen-orient de 20 000 BP à 6 000 BP. pp. 209-228.

The arrival of agriculture into Europe during the Neolithic transition brought a significant shift in human lifestyle and subsistence. However, the conditions under which the spread of the new culture and technologies occurred are still debated. Similarly, the roles played by women and men during the Neolithic transition are not well understood, probably due to the fact that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome (NRY) data are usually studied independently rather than within the same statistical framework. Here, we applied an integrative approach, using different model-based inferential techniques, to analyse published datasets from contemporary and ancient European populations. By integrating mtDNA and NRY data into the same admixture approach, we show that both males and females underwent the same admixture history and both support the demic diffusion model of Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza. Similarly, the patterns of genetic diversity found in extant and ancient populations demonstrate that both modern and ancient mtDNA support the demic diffusion model. They also show that population structure and differential growth between farmers and hunter-gatherers are necessary to explain both types of data. However, we also found some differences between male and female markers, suggesting that the female effective population size was larger than that of the males, probably due to different demographic histories. We argue that these differences are most probably related to the various shifts in cultural practices and lifestyles that followed the Neolithic Transition, such as sedentism, the shift from polygyny to monogamy or the increase of patrilocality. FCT grant: (SFRH/BD/30821/2006), CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France), Laboratoire d’Excellence LABEX TULIP (ANR-10-LABX-41), CALMIP, Toulouse grants: (2010-P1038, 2012-P1244).

Introduction The main purpose of this volume is to provide empirical data concerning the health of Australia's original inhabitants over the last 50,000 years. The trouble with such a task is that the palaeopathological evidence on which it is based is comparatively slight, because of its limited disease spectrum, and incomplete in terms of the skeletal material that is available. Unfortunately, we have no data for thousands of years at a time and when it is available it almost always covers only a minute part of the continent. Nevertheless, one must remain undaunted by these constraints as well as being slightly buoyed by the fact that this is the nature of this type of study for any area of the globe. Therefore, in the first part of this chapter I will try and gather together the meagre evidence for the health of people living in the Australian late Pleistocene. The second part puts together a more complete picture of Aboriginal health in the Holocene. It compares and contrasts different parts of the continent and interprets health in terms of the wider lifestyle of Aboriginal people and how they lived. No doubt some people will disagree with certain diagnoses, that is normal in palaeopathology; others will reject the social and demographic conclusions and implications that I have made based on these. In the end it is my hope that the presentation of the data in itself will improve our understanding of Aboriginal health, demography, ecology, epidemiology, palaeobiology and the adaptive capabilities of the people that lived here before European colonisation.

The late prehistoric period (ca. A.D. 900-1600) in central Virginia witnessed the gradual construction of a group of earth-stone and earthen accretional burial mounds, many of which contained the remains of over one thousand individuals. Their appearance coincides with a number of fundamental and relatively rapid cultural transformations, including decreasing mobility, increasing reliance on agriculture, and growing social inequality and heterogeneity. Despite the steady attention of archaeologists since the eighteenth-century excavation of Thomas Jefferson, the cultural significance of the mounds, and their relation to such far-reaching changes in their surroundings, are largely unknown. On an empirical level, this study represents the first comprehensive synthesis of the various burial forms contained within and under the accretional mounds. On a theoretical level, this study represents an extended critique of current approaches to mortuary ritual and assumptions about symbolism in archaeology. An alternative, middle-range model of mortuary ritual, based largely on post-structuralist assumptions about ritual and meaning, is developed to link the documented, longterm changes in the form of mound burial practices to the concurrent transformations in social organization, mobility, and subsistence occurring outside of the grave. Note: Abstract extracted from PDF file via OCR.

New human burials from northern Jordan provide important insights into the appearance of cemeteries and the nature of human-animal relationships within mortuary contexts during the Epipalaeolithic period (c. 23,000-11,600 cal BP) in the Levant, reinforcing a socio-ideological relationship that goes beyond predator-prey. Previous work suggests that archaeological features indicative of social complexity occur suddenly during the latest Epipalaeolithic phase, the Natufian (c. 14,500-11,600 cal BP). These features include sedentism, cemeteries, architecture, food production, including animal domestication, and burials with elaborate mortuary treatments. Our findings from the pre-Natufian (Middle Epipalaeolithic) cemetery of 'Uyun al-Hammam demonstrate that joint human-animal mortuary practices appear earlier in the Epipalaeolithic. We describe the earliest human-fox burial in the Near East, where the remains of dogs have been found associated with human burials at a number of Natufian sites. This is the first time that a fox has been documented in association with human interments pre-dating the Natufian and with a particular suite of grave goods. Analysis of the human and animal bones and their associated artefacts provides critical data on the nature and timing of these newly-developing relationships between people and animals prior to the appearance of domesticated dogs in the Natufian.

In the past 15,000 years, epochal social and cultural changes have created fundamentally different relationships between humankind and the environment. One of the most important innovations has been the domestication of plants and animals, a major factor in the gradual establishment of agriculture as the world’s predominant economic base. The development of agriculture brought an increase in sedentism, in which human groups lived in more or less permanent communities. Associated with farming was the domestication of animals and, in some societies, nomadic pastoralism. By about 6000 B.C., animal husbandry provided a relatively widespread and stable source of high-quality protein in the Near East. Moreover, the protein was typically produced in ways that did not compete directly for agricultural land resources. Domestic herds grazed on agricultural land after the harvest (Bentley 1987) or on land that was fallow, marginal, or inadequate for farming. The greater control that agriculture and the domestication of animals gave people over food production resulted in food surpluses. Surplus food created the potential for the emergence of specialists such as craftsmen, merchants, and a ruler class, which are essential components of urban society, another major social change. Urbanism began in the Near East during the Chalcolithic Age (c. 4000–3200 B.C.) but had its major efflorescence during the Early Bronze Age (c. 3200–2000 B.C.) The advent of agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the development of urbanism had a significant impact on human health. Although agriculture dramatically increased the calories that could be produced by a given individual, the emphasis on a few cultigens increased the vulnerability of agricultural societies to famine and malnutrition (Cohen 1984a).

Evidence suggests that subsistence practices during the late prehistoric occupation of Narragansett Bay were characterized by continuing attempts to expand and diversify the available resource base. Data from Greenwich Cove and other sites in the region indicate that new items were added to the diet over time, while traditional foods remained important throughout the sequence. Throughout the coastal Northeast, shellfishing gained in importance as sea level stabilized and, over time, provided an increasingly valuable source of protein. Increased sedimentation in the cove after sea level stabilized probably led to this development. There is neither any evidence for the overexploitation of oysters at the end of the Terminal Archaic period nor is there any reason to suspect that changes in technology or food preferences were responsible. Compared with the use of oyster and soft-shelled clam, the use of quahog shows little fluctuation during the sequence represented at Greenwich Cove. Some of the same general trends have been seen in the use of wild plant foods, although plant remains are poorly preserved at Greenwich Cove and at many of the other Narragansett Bay sites. It also considers the relative sedentism of the region's coastal inhabitants in light of the fact that they have not been practicing anything approaching intensive agriculture.

Early sedentary settlement in Ecuador made headlines among New World archaeologists in the 1950s and 1960s with the discovery of the Valdivia culture (Meggers et al. 1965). More than 6000 years old (in calibrated radiocarbonyears), exhibiting comparatively well-made, distinctively decorated ceramics, and associated with relatively large, deep sites in the tropical lowlands of South America, Valdivia was anomalous in the generally accepted cultural historical schemes of the time. Early manifestations of sedentism and ceramics were expected in highland Mexico or in the arid mountains and coast of the Central Andes; yet Valdivia antedated (and still antedates) evidence of such developments in both areas by more than 1000 years. Shortly after the discovery of Valdivia a settlement of similar age and character was excavated in the moist tropics of northern Colombia (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1965), and sedentary settlement in the upper Amazon was shown to extend back to at least the beginning of the second millennium B.C. (Lathrap 1970). Clearly, notions of cultural developments in the American tropics needed revision. The nature and antiquity of settlement has been borne out by subsequent research in all three areas. In northern Colombia the ceramic sequence has been extended to 6700 B.P. and on the lower Amazon pottery is more than a millennium older (Oyuela-Caycedo 1987, 1990; Raymond 1987; Roosevelt et al. 1991).

"Perspectives on the Past" shows how knowledge of the past is contingent and is largely determined by the social and intellectual milieux in which those who study it have received their training. This work examines major components of the general paradigms that structure hunter-gatherer research in the Mediterranean area. In the original essays that comprise the volume, field archaeologists discuss their own biases and the effects these biases have on how they do their research. For example, one contributor describes his shift from the traditional, "essentially historical view of prehistory" to "the evolutionary paradigm now advocated by many archaeologists" and explains the modifications of both theory and method that this change has necessitated. Other topics range from biases in "cave bound" archaeology to "normal science" and preconceptions in Italian hunter-gatherer research, and from paradigms for interpreting chipped stone to those that structure the linkages between foraging, sedentism and adaptive vigour.

The tribe was camping in Hassan Agha's estates near a clump of mulberry trees. They had pitched their long black tents in a neat, orderly file, and this did not escape Hassan Agha's notice. Just as if they were founding a new village, he said to himself with growing anxiety. (From The Legend of the Thousand Bulls by Yashar Kemal) We have seen that the low archaeological profile of nomad sites cannot be attributed to the absence of material remains alone. But while nomad material culture and architecture may be comparable in variety and durability to that of more settled communities, the distribution of these remains occurs over a much wider range and in greatly reduced densities. Moreover the manner in which fluid patterns of residence group formation and fortuitous shifts in migration tracks are translated into archaeological assemblages will vary according to time and place. It is possible nevertheless to make some broad generalizations about what sets a nomad settlement system apart from a sedentary one and how nomad campsites differ fundamentally in their internal structure from sedentary communities. Nomad settlement systems The term ‘settlement system’ has been carefully chosen as against ‘settlement pattern’ in order to distinguish a system of controlling variables (Flannery 1976b, pp.162–3) from a physical pattern of settlement (Chang (ed.) 1968; Trigger 1968). The latter approach applied to nomad camps would yield a picture of segmented settlement units located in relation to each other according to patterns of kinship, tribal affiliation and economic cooperation.

During virtually the entire four-million-year history of our habitation on this planet, humans have been hunters and gatherers, dependent for nourishment on the availability of wild plants and animals. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, however, the most remarkable phenomenon in the course of human prehistory was set in motion. At locations around the world, over a period of about 5000 years, hunters became farmers. The implications of this revolution in human activity and social organization reverberate down to the present day. In case studies ranging from the Far East to the American Southwest, the authors of Last Hunters-First Farmers provide a global perspective on contemporary research into the origins of agriculture. Downplaying more traditional explanations of the turn to agriculture, such as the influence of marginal environments and population pressures, the authors emphasize instead the importance of the resource-rich areas in which agriculture began, the complex social organizations already in place, the role of sedentism, and, in some locales, the advent of economic intensification and competition.

Recent research in the uplands of the Mimbres Mogollon area of SW New Mexico has produced insight into the adaptability of the Mimbres with regard to mobility, settlement, and land use through time. This paper investigates the transition from mobility to sedentism during the Late Pithouse period in the Sapillo Valley, Gila National Forest, New Mexico. We introduce new data for the pithouse period derived from two recent research projects that document changes in settlement and land use resulting from a sharp increase in sedentism during the Three Circle phase (A.C. 750–1000) of the Late Pithouse period. The timing and nature of the transition to sedentism in upland areas of SW New Mexico is argued to be more variable than currently suggested for the Mogollon region in general. We argue that sedentism in upland and mountainous areas such as SW New Mexico should occur only when it is economically justifiable and cost-effective. In the Sapillo Valley this did not occur until the Three Circle phase an...

ment relationship as well as address a need to truly integrate environmental data with research in problem-oriented archaeology. The multidisciplinary, team-based character of environmental archaeology, in the view of the assemblers of this anthology, embraces aspects of earth and biological sciences in a pursuit of an understanding of behavior sensu lato embedded in the archaeological record. It is an archaeology that looks beyond the material culture to reveal what it connotes about the people who left it. This paradigm rests heavily upon the framework of Karl Butzer's archaeology as human ecology, the contextual approach of which is an interdisciplinary bridge that melds the many elements of an environmental archaeology. But the content of some of the contributions to this volume is admittedly multidisciplinary, rather than interdisciplinary. As such, the articles make methodological statements but their content does not focus on method; their instructive value is in the ways by which analyses are interpreted. Recurring themes among and within the 20 chapters are the systemic relationships between humans and the physical-biological world, nutrition and health, strategies for resource acquisition, domestication, exchange systems, and the emergence of social complexity. The chapters, each with its own list of references, are organized into five parts preceded by brief introductions. A diverse spectrum of topics is pursued in environments ranging from the hyperaridity of Death Valley to the tropical forests of Ecuador. The topics themselves range from middens in the Pacific Northwest to middens on the central Andean coast, from the Archaic period to the historic, from migration to sedentism, from parasites to people, from fishermen to horticulturalists, from latrines to isotopes. The first chapter sweeps through the disciplines that are viewed as integral to environmental archaeology. The four subfields of environmental archaeology are, arguably, archaeobotany, bioarchaeology (human remains), the earth sciences, and zooarchaeology (non-human remains). Bioand zooarchaeology are most extensively represented here since many of the contributors acknowledge the influence of Elizabeth S. Wing, to whom the book is dedicated. The listing of earth sciences is extensive (archaeogeology, archaeological geology, archaeometry, archaeopedology ("the study of ancient soils"), geoarchaeology, geomorphology, and sedimentology with a focus on size class distributions) but uncritically assembled, reflecting a failure to appreciate the distinction between the practitioner as an archaeologist, or as an earth scientist. Still, the interaction of people in the four subdisciplines is "probably the most significant factor in the field (of environmental archaeology) today" [p. 12]. In Chapter 2, William Marquardt shows that enhanced archaeological productivity results from the wider range of perspectives and questions that is introduced by multidisciplinary, team research. He recounts how this approach in sw Florida overturned four postulates of the regional preColumbian archaeology, among them the realization that coastal/estuarine habitation was year-around--a topic visited in a later article by Russo and Quitmyer. Archaeological work also corroborated an independently determined, rev ionist interpretation of sea levels of the first millennium A.C. in this coastal area. More attention needs to be

Introduction: The World at the End of the Last Ice Age L.G. Straus. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Africa and the Near East: L. Straus. At the Transition: The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Boundary in Southern Africa P.J. Mitchell, et al. Plus Ca Change: The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Northeastern Africa A.E. Close. The Impact of Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Climatic Changes on Humans in Southwestern Asia O. Bar-Yosef. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Europe: B.V. Eriksen. The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Southwest Europe L.G. Straus. Resource Exploitation, Subsistence Strategies and Adaptiveness in Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Northwestern Europe B.V. Eriksen. The North European Plain and Eastern Sub-Balticum between 12,000 and 8,000 B.P. R. Schild. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition on the East European Plain P.M. Dolukhanov. Asia and Australia during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition: J.M. Erlandson. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Greater Australia J. Allen, P. Kershaw. Human Activities and Environmental Changes during the Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene in Southern Thailand and Southeast Asia S. Pookajorn. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Japan and Adjacent Northeast Asia: Climatic and Biotic Change, Broadspectrum Diet, Pottery, and Sedentism C.M. Aikens, T. Akazawa. Siberia in the Late Glacial and Early Postglacial W.R. Powers. Environments and Peoples at the Pleistocene-Holocene Boundary in the Americas D.R. Yesner. Human Adaptation at the Pleistocene-Holocene Boundary (ca. 13,000 to 8,000 B.P.) in Eastern Beringia D.R. Yesner. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition along the Pacific Coast of North America J.M. Erlandson, M.L. Moss. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition on the Plains and Rocky Mountains of North America G.C. Frison, R. Bonnichsen. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Eastern United States D.F. Morse, et al. The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Southern South America L.A. Borrero. Conclusion: Surprises, Recurring Themes, and New Questions in the Study of the Late Glacial and Early Postglacial M.A. Jochim. Index.

The Archaic was the longest cultural period in the prehistory of North America. Although the timing and duration of the period vary regionally, it spans roughly the six millennia between 8,000 and 2,000 years before present. A number of important cultural changes took place during the Archaic period, including a move toward sedentism, the refinement of a sophisticated hunting and gathering economy coupled with the cultivation of indigenous plants, and interaction and trade among people in distant areas. Given the length of this period and the significance of the cultural transitions that occurred, one would expect that archaeological understanding of Archaic cultures would be thorough. This is not the case, however, and this volume underscores one of the primary reasons why our knowledge is so fragmentary: physical changes that occurred in the land during the Holocene make it difficult to identify Archaic sites.

located on the footslopes of the al-Bara Massif in south central Jordan, not far from Petra. The short monograph reviewed here is a detailed techno-typological study of the roughly 5000 chipped stone artifacts recovered during investigation of the site. The descriptive analysis is exhaustive and undeniably competent. All major indices are presented, as are important technological data like metric distributions of different artifact classes, including blank types. Indeed, the wealth of data is impressive, and are more or less easily incorporated into any greater synthesis of Natufian or Epipaleolithic lithic industries. The book is divided into 10 short chapters. The first five, Introduction, Research situation, Site description, Methodology, and General classification, provide a general background to the site, its assemblage, and the basic frameworks used in the analysis. These background statements are fundamentally sound and straightforward, drawing on standard Levantine Paleolithic practice. They are supplemented by three appendices describing the coding systems and attributes recorded (A), the Tool Type List (B), and a list of raw material types (C). The next four chapters, Technological analysis, Tool blank analysis, Typological analysis, and Comparative analysis, are detailed analytic descriptions of the different elements of the lithic assemblage, followed by a comparison with other selected Natufian collections. The primary conclusions are summarized in the final chapter, Conclusion. Even more briefly summarized they are: 1) that the assemblage constitutes a reasonable sample, in spite of post-depositional disturbance, and by extension, so do other surface assemblages, 2) there was some deliberate selection of raw materials, and some offsite preparation of both cores and debitage, 3) blade production shows more "control" than does flake production, and there is evidence for some preference for specific attributes in the selection of blades for modification into tools, 4) according to tool frequencies, the site should be dated to the latter part of the Early Natufian, and 5) relatively high tool type diversity, and the low tool:debitage ratio together suggest a "longer duration" of occupation, although not sedentism. In spite of this, and at the risk of being accused of cursing the light, the study is problematic technically, and in terms of substance. The technical problems begin with what is not presented. There is no map of the site. The text indicates a general scatter on the order of 12,000 sq m, from which 64 sq m were systematically collected in two 2 m x 16 m transects, one N-s and one E-wV, in the center and densest area of the site. This is a huge scatter as far as desert Natufian sites go, yet no estimate is made of the original size of the site, nor even the size of the dense part of the scatter. The problem is particularly acute in light of the claim that "movement has not destroyed totally the spatial distribution" [p. 20], although no spatial analyses were included due to the erosion of the materials [p. 20]. The 5123 artifacts recovered from the collection area constitute quite a high lithic density, and if this extends over the entire area of the transects, as claimed, the site is one of the richest desert Natufian sites investigated in terms of lithic density (compare to Goring-Morris 1987: 287, table VIII-3). Even in the absence of architecture, a plan of the general scatter with the location of the transects, as well as various topographical f-eatures (runnels, pits, the escarpment) seems a basic part of the documentation of such a site, especially in a monograph. Debitage categories are not presented in a summary chart. Although Table 3 [p. 37] presents the frequencies of "Primary Products," there is no breakdown here of flakes, blades, and bladelets. Admittedly, various ratios of different types of blades and flakes are presented in

Sedentarization has been implicated in the reduction of gender equality in some spheres of formerly nomadicJu/thoansi (!Kung) and Nharo Basarwa (Bushmen) life. Concomitant with the shift to sedentism, both the Ju/hoansi and Nharo have undergone significant economic transformations, and these have been accompanied by changes in attitudes towards gender. Gender equality is examined among the Central Kalahari Basarwa who inhabit Kutse, a sedentary community in which economic change and the adoption of neighbouring people's attitudes have not been as widespread as elsewhere. Qualitative and quantitative studies show that gender egalitarianism is still quite strong at Kutse. It is suggested that not all foragers who become sedentary also become less egalitarian. Instead, the adoption of the economics and attitudes towards gender from non-foraging neighbours facilitates the emergence of gender inequality in those Basarwa societies formerly noted for their egalitarianism. Some current development programmes designed by Westerners exclude women and contribute to the increase in gender inequality which is emerging in these societies.