Sedentism

In evolutionary anthropology and archaeology, sedentism (sometimes denominated sedentariness), is a term applied to the transition from nomadic to permanent, year-round settlement.

Requirements for permanent settlements

It is difficult to settle down permanently—to become sedentary—in a landscape without on-site agricultural or cattle-breeding resources, since sedentism requires:

• sufficient year-round local natural resources;
• sufficient easily-accessible local natural resources (several hundred meters distant, at most).

Sedentism is a consequence of the discovery of agriculture. [this is no longer considered accurate]

Both situations require good preservation and storage technologies. For example cooking, smoking, drying and fermenting of foods, as well as good containers such as pottery, baskets or special pits in which to securely store food whilst making it available. It was only at locations where the resources of several major ecosystems overlapped that enabled the earliest sedentism to occur (pre-agricultural sedentism). For example where a river met the sea, at lagoon environments along the coast, at river confluences, or where flat savanna met hills and mountains with rivers.

Before agriculture

During the last 30 years archaeological research has shown the earliest sedentism started before one began with on-site agriculture and cattle breeding, and most researchers now believe that sedentism was a prerequisite for the first agriculture to occur. Sedentism, both without agriculture and with this economy, usually meant more people, sturdier houses, new stone tools, more jewelry, burials or cemeteries, more long-distance goods and also clear signs of stratification. At sedentary sites usually more people lived together for a longer time compared to earlier base camp sites or annual gathering sites. This created deeper cultural layers and thus generally richer archaeological materials. There are also indications that the use of rock art is connected to sedentism, both pre-agricultural and agricultural forms.

Regions

A year-round sedentary site, with its usually larger population, generates a substantial demand on local resources, a demand that, for example in the Middle East, could have triggered the first attempts to cultivate plants on-site. In the Middle East the Natufian culture was the first to become sedentary at around 12000 BC. The Natufians were sedentary during a period of more than 2000 years before they at some sites started to cultivate plants around 10000 BC. However, the first sedentary sites consisted of pre-agricultural ones, and they appeared during the Upper Paleolithic in Moravia in Europe and on the Russian Plain already during the interval of c. 25000-17000 BC.

The Jomon culture in Japan, which was primarily a coastal culture, was sedentary from c. 12000 to 10000 BC until the cultivation of rice at some sites in northern Kyushu. In northernmost Scandinavia, there are several early sedentary sites without evidence of agriculture or cattle breeding. They appear from c. 5300-4500 BC and are all located optimally in the landscape for extraction of major ecosystem resources. In Sweden (the Lillberget Stone Age village site c. 3900 BC) represents such a site, in Norway (the Nyelv site c. 5300 BC, and in Finland (the Enare träsk site, c. 4500 BC). In northern Sweden the earliest indication of agriculture occurs at previously sedentary sites, and one example is the Bjurselet site used during the period c. 2700-1700 BC, famous for its large caches of long distance traded flint axes from Denmark and southernmost Sweden (some 1300 km). The evidence of small scale agriculture at that site can be seen from c. 2300 BC (burnt cereals of barley).

Effects of sedentism

Sedentism increased contacts and trade, and the first Middle East cereals and cattle in Europe, could have spread through a stepping stone process, where the productive gift (the cereals, cattle, sheep and goat) was exchanged through a network of large pre-agricultural sedentary sites, rather than a wave of advance spread of people with agricultural economy, and where the smaller sites found in between the bigger sedentary ones, did not get any of the new products. Not all contemporary sites during a certain period (after the first sedentism occurred at one site) were sedentary. Evaluation of habitational sites in northern Sweden indicates that less than 10 percent of all the sites around 4000 BC, were sedentary. At the same time, only 0.5-1 percent of these represented villages with more than 3-4 houses. This means that the old nomadic or migratory life style continued in a parallel fashion for several thousand years, until somewhat more sites turned to sedentism, and gradually switched over to agricultural sedentism.

The shift to sedentism is coupled with the adoption of new subsistence strategies, specifically from foraging (hunter-gatherer) to agricultural and animal domestication. The development of sedentism led to the rise of population aggregation and formation of villages, cities, and other community types.

In North America, evidence for sedentism emerges around 4500 BC.^{[citation needed]}

Forced sedentism

Forced sedentism or sedentarization occurs when a dominant group restricts the movements of a nomadic group. Nomadic populations have undergone such a process since the first cultivation of land; the organization of the modern society have imposed demands that have pushed aboriginal populations to adopt a fixed habitat.

There are many examples of forced sedentarization with detrimental effects on minority groups in developed countries. The fate of many formerly nomadic groups has mainly been determined by policies instituted during western colonialism or by modern western governments, which could arguably be considered genocide. The ongoing destruction of nomadic peoples' way of life constitutes a decline in human diversity, contributing to the hegemony of westernized civilization, which interestingly is contradictory to certain western governments' political doctrine of tolerance.

This can cause great social decline, and also weaken the ethnic identity of the population affected, as examples show of North American indigenous peoples such as the Inuit in the mid-20th century.

See also

• Bantustan
• Indian reservation
• Paleolithic diet
• Sedentary lifestyle
• Timeline of agriculture and food technology

Notes

References

• Fagan, Brian. 2005. Ancient North America. Thames & Hudson, Ltd.: London.
• Halén, Ove. 1994. Sedentariness During the Stone Age of Northern Sweden Almkvist & Wiksell, Stockholm.
• Sofer, Olga. 1981 Sedentism During the Paleolithic
• Habu, Junku. 2004 Ancient Jomon of Japan Cambridge University Press