Early Village Research Articles

How many people lived in the world’s earliest villages? Reconsidering community size and population pressure at Neolithic Çatalhöyük

Adopting a building and village biography approach combining archaeology and ethnography, we critically reevaluate the historical argument that Neolithic villages were occupied by many thousands of people. Focusing on the settlement at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, where it has been argued that 3,500 and 10,000 people lived in the village, we argue that this is a significant overestimate of the number of people that occupied this settlement. Drawing upon revised distribution of residential buildings across the mound, and employing archaeological and ethnographic data exploring building life-history, we estimate that between 600 and 800 people would have lived at Çatalhöyük East during an average year during the Middle (6700–6500 cal BC) phase. This research highlights the need to critically revaluate historical population estimates for Neolithic villages, the importance of developing explicit population modeling methods in archaeology, and to reconsider population-driven evolutionary models linking the Near Eastern Neolithic to urbanism.

The dynamics of fishing villages along the South Atlantic Coast of North America (ca. 5000–3000 years BP)

We present new chronologies that inform the timing and tempo of shell ring and shell mound construction on the South Atlantic Bight. Our project combines recently acquired dates with legacy radiocarbon dates from over 25 rings and mounds to provide a higher-resolution chronology regarding the occupation and formation of this larger landscape of the earliest fishing villages along the East Coast of the United States. We resolve the ordering and timing of occupation of these rings and mounds through Bayesian statistical modeling. These new models historicize and contextualize these shell rings in ways previously impossible. Specifically, our new chronologies of these villages indicate that the earliest villages were established prior to the invention of pottery. The early period of village establishment evidences isolated village rings, whereas later periods seem to have more villages, but these appear to have been relocated to other areas and/or islands over time. Shell mounds are fewer in number, are spread throughout the time period, and may represent special purpose sites compared to shell-rings. Once villages spread, they quickly adopted new technologies (i.e., pottery) and created new institutions and practiced village relocation, which allowed this way of life to persist for more than a thousand years.

Oikonymy of the Livvik Karelians

The article investigates the settlement names in Southern (Olonets) Karelia, where the Livvik dialect of the Karelian language has been spoken for centuries. The study highlights that, in the early stages of settlement by Livvik Karelians, the development of villages was shaped by the region’s physical geography and the population’s way of life. Due to the abundance of lakes and rivers in Southern Karelia, early villages were mostly established along these water bodies. However, from the 18th century onwards, settlements began to develop on higher ground, leading to the formation of “settlement” type villages. The article focuses on the types of rural settlements and the structure of their names. The most common single-component names include oikonyms with the -l formant, typically derived from personal names. Less common are deanthroponymic patterns without a formant, and those with the formants -(i)ne, -sto, or the Russian -ovo and -shchina. Among other oikonyms, those based on geographical terms such as pogostu ‘village with a church,’ kylä and hieru ‘village’ are particularly prevalent. The study also identifies terms for smaller settlements and farmsteads, such as kodi, kondu, perti, and taloi, along with terms borrowed from Russian, like myza and khutor. The author examines why certain types of oikonyms are more common, the timeline of their adoption into the local toponymy, and the inclusion of reconstructed terms like moiživo and tula, which likely referred to small homesteads. The author concludes that the formation of the settlement system in Southern Karelia peaked in the early 20th century but began to decline with collectivisation and subsequent repressions, leading to the abandonment of many villages in the 1960s and 1970s.

New perspectives on plant-use at neolithic Abu Hureyra, Syria: an integrated phytolith and spherulite study

Archaeobotanical remains contribute crucial evidence for shifts in human economy from foraging to farming, understanding early village life and the strategies employed by people in the past to cope with changing environmental conditions. However, differential preservation of plant proxies often leads to the over or under representation of some plant types. This research analyses phytoliths and faecal spherulites to provide new perspectives on human economy at the Neolithic site of Abu Hureyra, N. Syria (∼ 11100–6000 bc) and plant taphonomy by comparing results with those from previous extensively analysed charred plant macro-fossils. This site is of especial importance as one of the earliest and largest pre-pottery Neolithic B farming settlements in the world, however, it was flooded following the construction of the Tabqa dam in the 1970s. This research therefore presents a case study for some of the methods that can be applied to archival material to continue research in areas of high archaeological significance that are no longer accessible. The presence of dung spherulites suggests a background faecal component in sediments throughout the lifespan of the site, and should therefore be considered as a depositional pathway for some of the charred plant macrofossils and phytoliths. Phytolith analyses show that a diverse range of vegetation types were exploited throughout the lifespan of Abu Hureyra, reflecting the site’s favourable position on the border of several ecotones, which likely contributed to its longevity over several millennia.

Understanding multi-sited early village communities of the American Southeast through categorical identities and relational connections

Early villages are often assumed to be economically and politically autonomous and equivalent to an archaeological socio-spatial unit that represents a maximum scale of cohesive residential communities. But the boundaries of some communities extended far beyond such sites of early population aggregation. In the coastal plain of the American Southeast, early village communities of the Middle and Late Woodland period (ca. 100 to 1000 CE) were located at civic-ceremonial centers that hosted periodic large-scale events, including feasting and mound building. These places regularly integrated mobile populations and permanent residents, arguably creating translocal communities that were both spatially expansive and densely integrated. We employ social network analysis as a way of identifying the spatial extent, composition, and structure of these translocal communities. We compare relational connections via a database of shared makers’ marks on Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery with categorical identities revealed in temporally constrained pottery type frequencies. We find that most early villages in this region were far from autonomous and instead were characterized by frequent relational connections and shared categorical identities spanning hundreds of kilometers, with civic-ceremonial centers serving as central nodes of interaction within and between spatially dispersed communities.

RAISING THE “BAAR” THROUGH IMPROVED METHOD AND THEORY: REINVIGORATING REGIONAL RESEARCH ON ARCHAIC OCCUPATIONS IN NORTHERN BELIZE

Although much research has explored the transition to early village life in the Maya Lowlands, comparatively less attention has focused on the ~6000-year period of Archaic occupation in the region. Initiatives like the Belize Archaic Archaeological Reconnaissance (BAAR) Project were ground-breaking forty years ago, and firmly established an Archaic presence in northern Belize. While the interpretations and lithic chronological sequences developed by the BAAR are problematic, the published results are still widely cited and support a growing body of new research on this period. Today, most BAAR sites fall within the boundaries of our project, the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) Project, and we have recently reinvigorated regional research on the Archaic period in this area. Here we describe our work re-identifying and accurately geolocating some of the key Archaic sites established by the BAAR, and field strategies implemented to mitigate issues of stratigraphic sequencing and temporal anchoring. Hindsight and improved technological methods have helped us develop a multipronged, systematic surface and subsurface strategy for detecting, recording, and interpreting Archaic occupational scatters. Centered on the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, our project resumes research on the successful and sustainable Archaic adaptations that preceded the earliest Maya in northern Belize.

Van ‘onderlinge hulp’ naar ‘onkunde en vooroordeel’

From ‘mutual aid’ to ‘ignorance and prejudice’. Changes in literary representations of adversity in the countryside, 1850-1914. In nineteenth-century Dutch village tales, rural communities often face adversity due to natural hazards. However, representations of (dealing with) adversity change over time. In early village tales (ca. 1850-1885), natural hazards are portrayed as unavoidable, whereas some early twentieth-century village tales emphasise the importance of risk management. Moreover, communities in later village tales might more often resort to blame in the context of natural calamities. This article argues that the changing attitude towards adversity can be linked to the late-nineteenth-century agricultural crisis in Europe, caused by cheap import of agricultural products from the United States and Canada, which lead to an increasing rationalisation of the Dutch countryside.

Was the Fishing Village of Lepenski Vir Built by Europe’s First Farmers?

It is now widely accepted that agriculture and settled village life arrived in Europe as a cultural package, carried by people migrating from Anatolia and the Aegean Basin. The putative fisher-forager site of Lepenski Vir in Serbia has long been acknowledged as an exception to this model. Here, the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition—possibly inspired by interaction with the new arrivals—was thought to have taken place autochthonously on site. Our reinterpretation, based on ancient genomes, as well as archaeological and isotopic evidence, indicates that here, too, house construction, early village society and agriculture were primarily associated with Europe’s first farmers, thus challenging the long-held view of Lepenski Vir as a Mesolithic community that adopted Neolithic practices. Although aspects of the site's occupation, such as the trapezoidal houses, were inspired by local Mesolithic traditions, it is far from certain that the village was founded by Iron Gates foragers. A detailed timeline of population changes at the site suggests that Aegean incomers did not simply integrate into an established Mesolithic society, but rather founded new lineages and households. Iron Gates foragers and their admixed descendants largely appear to have been buried separately, on the fringes of the settlement. The diet of those buried outside in pits shows no major shift from aquatic to terrestrial food resources.

Diet and Lifestyle in the First Villages of the Middle Preceramic: Insights from Stable Isotope and Osteological Analyses of Human Remains from Paloma, Chilca I, La Yerba III, and Morro I

We present stable isotope and osteological data from human remains at Paloma, Chilca I, La Yerba III, and Morro I that offer new evidence for diet, lifestyle, and habitual mobility in the first villages that proliferated along the arid Pacific coast of South America (ca. 6000 cal BP). The data not only reaffirm the dietary primacy of marine protein for this period but also show evidence at Paloma of direct access interactions between the coast and highlands, as well as habitual mobility in some parts of society. By locating themselves at the confluence of diverse coastal and terrestrial habitats, the inhabitants of these early villages were able to broaden their use of resources through rounds of seasonal mobility, while simultaneously increasing residential sedentism. Yet they paid little substantial health penalty for their settled lifestyles, as reflected in their osteological markers of stature and stress, compared with their agriculturalist successors even up to five millennia later. Contrasting data for the north coast of Chile indicate locally contingent differences. Considering these data in a wider chronological context contributes to understanding how increasing sedentism and population density laid the foundations here for the emergence of Late Preceramic social complexity.

Early Chinese Village Patterns in Terms of the Origin of Civilization in China

Early Chinese villages and cities were born simultaneously from primitive settlements and existed side by side. As a significant part of China’s early social structure, they should be regarded as an important marker of the origin and development of Chinese civilization. The early villages were mainly clustered settlements that were under the rule of cities from the day they came into being. Villages and cities usually formed a single community, and their relations were essentially patriarchal and political. The early villages were mainly patriarchal clan organizations which were overlaid by geo-administrative organizations in the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods. The mainstay of basic village organization thus became the household registration of the common people.

Introduction of Lifecycle of Community Framework: Grappling with Multiple, Complex Datasets in Interpreting Yama/Nagaya, a Late Nineteenth- to Early Twentieth-Century Pacific Northwest Japanese Immigrant Village

Documentary archaeology presents the challenge and opportunity for innovation in understanding the past. This article introduces the Lifecycle of Community, a flexible framework that addresses the challenge of integrating different evidentiary lines at different scales into meaningful narratives. Yama/Nagaya Village is presented as a case study to exemplify the process. The framework establishes a deeper narrative of the community, provides recommendations for future archaeological work conducted at the site as well as in artifact analysis, and contributes to the growing literature on the archaeology of a community.

La Consentida: Settlement, Subsistence, and Social Organization in an Early Formative Mesoamerican Community

In this book, Guy David Hepp presents detailed information from excavations he directed at La Consentida on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. Importantly, he shows that this site is one of the first settlements (ca. 1900–1600 BCE) in Mexico and Central America found thus far. Archaeologists have debated the causes and nature of early sedentism and the rise of social hierarchy in Mesoamerica for decades. This book joins that debate. What is interesting is that the author argues that we should consider changes in social life along with shifting economics and ecology in the rise of permanent villages, agriculture, and social differentiation. The value of the book rests in its cogent presentation of current theories regarding the establishment of sedentary societies in the Americas and the supporting archaeological evidence. The author effectively presents data for environmental adaptation, interregional interaction, permanent settlement, and social differentiation at La Consentida. The author does not discuss religion or politics in the rise of village societies in great detail despite his consideration of socioeconomic status and ceremony in some chapters.This book contains a great variety of information on people's lives at this early village. The site has a small number of earthen mounds, but their existence points to an organized community and control over local labor. The findings suggest communal collective action for larger mound construction, of which there is a growing body of literature that the author does not engage much. It is possible that smaller domestic platforms existed here. However, they are harder to find in the deep soils accumulated at the site over the last 4,000 years. More excavations away from visible architecture would be needed to learn more about the smaller domestic, or perhaps even ritual, constructions.The completeness of the study is remarkable; the author analyzed most of the artifacts, animal bone, human burials, and architecture. One interesting find is the identification of one of the earliest pottery types in Mesoamerica. Furthermore, the pottery has strong affinities with the highlands and west Mexico rather than coastal sites. Some pottery may support the occurrence of feasting, as do the specific locations of select food remains. However, other pots were generally used for cooking and serving food. The author's analysis of the pottery appears in a helpful appendix containing photos, tables, and drawings.Many insights on the ancient diet at La Consentida were gleaned from examining ground stone tools, stonecutting tools, human bone, and animal remains. Analyses of plant remains are not provided. The data point to the exploitation of a nearby bay and rivers, making the subsistence adaptation at La Consentida different from the known estuary sites in the region. The acquisition of crocodiles and catfish rather than shellfish and saltwater species for food was an interesting discovery. However, chemical assays of human bone and the later importance of ground stone point to the increasing importance of maize in later times. Thus, the author shows that maize agriculture actually did not coincide with population growth and social differentiation at La Consentida, as others would believe. Obsidian cutting tools from different sources in Mesoamerica also signal far-ranging social and economic ties, as does the pottery. The interpretations of ceramic figurine iconography bolstered the author's reconstructions of social organization and social differentiation. Yet the prevalence of nude female figurines begs a treatment of gender and women's input in community structure, artifact manufacture, and religious ideology.In the end, this is an excellent book, and it is one of the best I have read recently in Mesoamerican archaeology. It is well written and tightly organized, and it presents extensive data to back the author's theoretical positions on the establishment of village societies. His scholarship and knowledge of the archaeology of the first Mesoamerican communities are impressive. A big advantage of the study rests with the extensive laboratory work on different artifact types, and not just pottery or stone tools, for instance. Instead, the author examines a great deal of evidence in an admirable manner. Other archaeologists may dispute the author's conclusions, but his contributions are clear: we need to consider regional differences in the rise of communal living in Mesoamerica and never lose sight of the social conditions involved in culture change. Sedentary populations, agriculture, interregional interaction, and the evolution of elites came about at the same time, and one of these, such as agriculture, did not singlehandedly drive changes in the others.

Dinamika Peradaban Kampung di Bangka

Indonesia is known for its vast territory consisting of thousands of islands. One of them is Pulau Bangka—an island which also includes many villages in the right and left row of roads with other completeness as the reality of the village in Bangka. Sociologically, the island is harmed because the form of the village in Bangka is more due to colonial policy in the middle of nineteen century. It was , different from previous village land inherited by the ancestors (Atok-Nek) in Bangka. This article focuses on early village discussions in Bangka named kampung with qualitative research methods sourced from data related to the subject matter. This research produces several sub-discussions, namely: village philosophy, archaeological data in Bangka, the history of kampung in Bangka, kampung and strengthening civilization. Kampung does not appear immediately in the history of Bangka, but there were in long process. Early Bangka people inherited some ranges; memarung, panggung, bubung kampung and nganggung. Then adopted by Malay Islam (urang lah. In philosophical Islam, there was a process of strengthening local wisdom values as a form of kampung civilization in Bangka island.

Lithic Technological Organization and Hafting in Early Villages

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.

Protohistoric Marine Shell Working: New Evidence from Northern Illinois

In the US Midwest, the working of marine shell procured through vast trade networks has typically been associated with elite prestige economies and craft specialization at major Mississippian centers. Outside of these contexts, marine shell goods are often assumed to have been brought into communities as completed goods. A recent finding suggests that local, small-scale marine shell working occurred at an early seventeenth-century village in northern Illinois, Middle Grant Creek (11Wi2739). This finding represents the first probable evidence of marine shell working in the Midwest outside of large, Mississippian contexts. Consequently, this practice may be much more geographically and temporally expansive than previously thought. This evidence encourages a rethinking of marine shell finds whenever they are assumed to be imported as finished goods.

Parasite infection at the early farming community of Çatalhöyük

Abstract

San Xavier Del Wa:k’s Late-Eighteenth-Century Fortified Village Revealed in Early Imagery and Texts

Some of the earliest historical drawings and photographs provide a fragmentary look at a long-gone defensive village occupied by San Xavier del Bac’s O’odham residents. Together these images reveal the character of a village that had been lost to history. Having moved the village south sometime between 1772 and 1780, during the Franciscan period, the new Wa:k O’odham village took on a form that differed substantially from the traditional Sobaipuri O’odham layout and house style that characterized the earlier village to the north. Structures were for the first time constructed of sun-dried adobes and formed rows of rectangular houses positioned in a square in what is now the church plaza. Passersby casually commented on this village, verifying the character and life span of this fortified O’odham village.

Shellfish, Geophytes, and Sedentism on Early Holocene Santa Rosa Island, Alta California, USA

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 ancient patterns of plant use, subsistence, and sedentism. Faunal data from shell midden samples retrieved from three site loci contain evidence for harvesting of rocky intertidal shellfish and estuarine clams and oysters from a paleo-estuary in the vicinity. CA-SRI-666 appears to have been an Early Holocene village site occupied year round. A key to the development of early sedentary societies on the island may have been geophytes, especially Brodiaea-type corms, which provided an abundant source of carbohydrates and calories that complemented marine resources rich in fat and whole animal proteins. Our data demonstrate the value of integrating paleobotanical and zooarchaeological data from island and coastal archaeological sites to help elucidate human social, cultural, and environmental dynamics, including sedentism.

GEOPHYSICAL PROSPECTION AT THE FORMATIVE SITE OF ALTICA IN THE TEOTIHUACAN VALLEY PIEDMONT

AbstractThe Formative-period site of Altica in the Patlachique Range poses many methodological problems when designing an excavation strategy. Three millennia of erosion, twentieth-century chisel plowing, and modern reforestation efforts have destroyed or disturbed most surface architecture above the local tepetate bedrock. As such, in the early stages of the Altica Project, the primary concern was the detection and identification of subsurface features, especially deep pits as found at other Formative sites. Although Altica is located at the top of a low, flat ridge, strong localized rain frequently flooded the terraces of interest for days, making it impossible to detect subsurface features using the most common prospection techniques. Because of these practical and taphonomic limitations, we relied on magnetic gradient prospection. This technique had never been applied to an early village site in the Basin of Mexico. This paper presents the methods used, discusses various difficulties encountered during prospection, applies interprets the results of the magnetic gradient study using results from excavation and aerial multispectral remote sensing. We discuss how the method might be applied to similar Formative sites to remotely detect indicators of anthropogenic activity, including subsurface features.

Raiding and Warfare in Early Farming Villages of the Sonoran Desert

The archaeological record of the precolumbian Southwest US and Northwest Mexico contains a wide variety of evidence for violence and warfare. We examined osteological evidence for trauma from the site of La Playa in Sonora, Mexico to identify if violence was present during the Early Agricultural period in the Sonoran Desert (as it was in the northern Southwest) and, if present, identify the source of that violence (i.e., warfare vs. social control). Traumatic injuries were present in 58% of the skeletal sample (TotalN = 131) and demonstrated that both males and females were both equally susceptible to accidents as well as victims of violence. Numerous healed cranial depression fractures, embedded projectile points, and probable forearm defensive fractures suggest that violence was endemic at the site, and more broadly across the Sonoran Desert during the Early Agricultural period. These patterns of violent traumatic injury mirror those expected for groups where raiding is common and may partly reflect captive taking and perhaps revenge killing.