Sedentary Village Life Research Articles

Early Maize in the Maya Area

The history of maize in Central America and surrounding areas has implications for the slow transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The spread of early forms of domesticated maize from southern Mexico across Mesoamerica and into South America has been dated to about 8,700–6,500 years ago on the basis of a handful of studies relying primarily on the analysis of pollen, phytoliths, or starch grains. Recent genomic data from southern Belize have been used to identify Archaic period south-to-north population movements from lower Central America, suggesting this migration pattern as a mechanism that introduced genetically improved maize races from South America. Gradually, maize productivity increased to the point that it was suitable for use as a staple crop. Here we present a summary of paleoecological data that support the late and uneven entry of maize into the Maya area relative to other regions of Central America and identify the Pacific coastal margin as the probable route by which maize spread southward into Panama and South America. We consider some implications of the early appearance of maize for Late Archaic populations in these areas; for example, with respect to the establishment of sedentary village life.

Investigating the Nile Delta’s First Settlements: Excavations at Tell el-Samara 2016-2019استقصاء للمستوطنات الأولى في دلتا النيل: أعمال التنقيب في تلّ السمارة ٢٠١٦-٢٠١٩

This article provides an overview of the first results from the archaeological fieldwork ­conducted at Tell el-Samara by a joint IFAO and Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities mission. Located in the eastern Nile Delta, Tell el-Samara was a settlement inhabited from the late 5h millennium BCE to the end of the Early Dynastic period. The renewed archaeological investigations on the tell have uncovered the remains of one of the most ancient villages known so far in Egypt—providing detailed insights into the onset of Neolithic economy and sedentary village life in Lower Egypt. They have also revealed a continuous occupation sequence from the Neolithic period to the advent of the 1st Dynasty, which provides relevant data on the emergence and further development of a regional culture in the Nile Delta prior to the rise of a monarchy and the political unification of Egypt at the turn of the fourth and 3rd millennium BCE.

Contextualizing Mississippian Migration in Early Fort Ancient Villages

Abstract The transition to sedentary village life and maize agriculture was an important turning point in the prehistory of the American midcontinent. This article presents the results of excavations at the Turpin site, one of the earliest agricultural villages in the Middle Ohio Valley, located just east of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although earlier researchers suggested that Turpin was occupied later during the Fort Ancient period, our work confidently anchors the site to the inception of the Fort Ancient archaeological culture. Excavations reported here produced evidence of two Mississippian-style walltrench structures, each of which dates between AD 1050 and AD 1275, demonstrating the early and nonlocal nature of occupation at the site. Material culture further supports the interpretation that the Turpin site reflects a community that included nonlocal peoples and traditions. Our findings provide archaeological support for recent biological studies suggesting that the inception of Fort Ancient culture along the Middle Ohio River was linked, at least in part, to an influx of people from neighboring Mississippian regions.

Mobility and Social Change: Understanding the European Neolithic Period after the Archaeogenetic Revolution

This paper discusses and synthesizes the consequences of the archaeogenetic revolution to our understanding of mobility and social change during the Neolithic period in Europe (6500–2000 BC). In spite of major obstacles to a productive integration of archaeological and anthropological knowledge with ancient DNA data, larger changes in the European gene pool are detected and taken as indications for large-scale migrations during two major periods: the Early Neolithic expansion into Europe (6500–4000 BC) and the third millennium BC “steppe migration.” Rather than massive migration events, I argue that both major genetic turnovers are better understood in terms of small-scale mobility and human movement in systems of population circulation, social fission and fusion of communities, and translocal interaction, which together add up to a large-scale signal. At the same time, I argue that both upticks in mobility are initiated by the two most consequential social transformations that took place in Eurasia, namely the emergence of farming, animal husbandry, and sedentary village life during the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of systems of centralized political organization during the process of urbanization and early state formation in southwest Asia.

Holocene vegetation, environment and anthropogenic influence in the Fuzhou Basin, southeast China

A ∼40m sediment core (FZ4) was collected from the Fuzhou Basin, near the lower reaches of the Min River, in Fujian Province on the southeast coast of China. The sediment and pollen record contributes to our understanding of Holocene paleogeography, including local changes in vegetation and climate in the context of Neolithic cultural developments. The sediment record reveals a fluvial environment in the Fuzhou Basin during the late Pleistocene, and it demonstrates that a change from fluvial to estuarine conditions at ∼9000calyr BP resulted from postglacial sea level rise. Evidence of abundant marine diatoms and tidal flat laminations observed in the FZ4 sediments, implies that the Fuzhou Basin was under marine influence between ∼9000 and ∼2000calyr BP. After 2000calyr BP, a rapid retreat in coastline associated with fluvial aggradation and coastal progradation produced more shallow water for wetlands and initiated formation of the floodplain landscape. The pollen record reveals the presence of a dense subtropical forest between ca. 9000 and 7000calyr BP, representing the Holocene thermal maximum, which is linked with rising sea level and marine transgression in the Fuzhou Basin. Between ca. 5500 and 2000calyr BP, the thermophilous forest dominated by Castanopsis retreated and coniferous forest expanded, reflecting moderate climatic cooling during this period. Timing of the high frequencies for Pinus and ferns correspond with the mid-late Holocene cooling trend recorded in local mountain peatland and coastal regions of the lower Yangtze and Hanjiang deltas. Anthropogenically induced land cover change was negligible prior to the Tanshishan cultural period, which marks the beginning of Neolithic era sedentary village life on the Fujian coast around 5500 BP. The pollen transition at ca. 3000–1500calyr BP, distinguished by rising frequencies of Poaceae and taxa (including Cyperaceae and Artemisia) closely associated with agricultural land cover, indicates exploitation of newly formed lowlands in the emerging Min River floodplain. The historic era intensification of rice agriculture is reflected in this trend of rising frequencies of Poaceae. After ca. 2000calyr BP, we observe the onset of a marine regression followed by evidence for an intensely human-impacted environment characterized by sharp rises in pioneer plants such as Poaceae and Dicranopteris. This transition coincides with a rapid retreat of coastline and emergence of the Fuzhou Basin floodplain.

Drought is a recurring challenge in the Middle East

Climate change and water availability in the Middle East are important in understanding human adaptive capacities in the face of long-term environmental changes. The key role of water availability for sedentary and nomad populations in these arid to semiarid landscapes is understood, but the millennium-scale influence of hydrologic instability on vegetation dynamics, human occupation, and historic land use are unknown, which has led to a stochastic view of population responses and adaptive capacities to precipitation anomalies. Within the time-frame of the last two global climate events, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age, we report hydrologic instability reconstructed from pollen-derived climate proxies recovered near Tell Leilan, at the Wadi Jarrah in the Khabur Plains of northeastern Syria, at the heart of ancient northern Mesopotamia. By coupling climate proxies with archaeological-historical data and a pollen-based record of agriculture, this integrative study suggests that variability in precipitation is a key factor on crop yields, productivity, and economic systems. It may also have been one of the main parameters controlling human settlement and population migrations at the century to millennial timescales in the arid to semiarid areas of the Middle East. An abrupt shift to drier conditions at ca. AD 1400 is contemporaneous with a change from sedentary village life to regional desertion and nomadization (sheep/camel pastoralists) during the preindustrial era in formerly Ottoman realms, and thereby adds climate change to the multiple causes for Ottoman Empire "decline."

Understanding Land Use, Livelihoods, and Health Transitions among Tibetan Nomads: A Case from Gangga Township, Dingri County, Tibetan Autonomous Region of China

Tibetan nomads in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China have experienced profound transitions in recent decades with important implications for land use, livelihoods, and health development. The change from being traditional nomads to agropastoralists engaged in permanent agriculture, a sedentary village life (known as "sedentarization"), has been associated with a remarkable change in diet and lifestyle, decline in spatial mobility, increase in food production, and emerging infectious and noncommunicable diseases. The overarching response of the government has been to emphasize infrastructure and technological solutions. The local adaptation strategies of Tibetan nomads through maintaining balanced mobile herding, reindeer husbandry, as well as off-farm labor and trade could address both the cause of environmental degradation and improve the well-being of local people. Drawing on transdisciplinary, preliminary field work in Gangga Township of Dingri County in the foothills of Mt. Everest, we identify pertinent linkages between land use and health, and spatial and temporal mismatch of livelihoods and health care services, in the transition to sedentary village life. We suggest emerging imperatives in Ecohealth to help restore Tibetan livelihoods in transition to a sedentary lifestyle.

Climatic events and environmental adaptations relating to the Mesolithic hominids of the Gangetic Plain

This study discusses the anthropological thesis that human body builds are linear and gracile with extremities relatively long in relation to trunk height dimensions among ancient and modern Homo sapiens inhabiting tropical environments. Populations adapted to cold stress conditions, ancient and modern, possess more massive body forms with shorter extremities and relatively long trunks and are skeletally robust. Anthropometric measurements of the femora are the components of the Robusticity Index, a value that has been used to support the idea that geographical latitudes and climates affect these physical developments. This index is evaluated with respect to early Holocene skeletal series from north-central India at the burial sites of Sarai Nahar Rai, Mahadaha, and Damdaha that are situated on the Gangetic Plain and at Lekhahia in the adjacent Vindhya Hills. Laboratory analyses by four paleoanthropologists, Canadian and American, lead them to conclude that the Gangetic hominids reveal a pronounced degree of muscular–skeletal robusticity and relatively tall stature for adult males and females. As hunter-gatherers, these ancient populations led stressful lifeways demanding a robust muscular–skeletal system energized in ways distinct from that of their descendants whose socioeconomic strategies involved domestication of plants and animals, sedentary village life and seasonal pastoralism. This difference is demonstrated in studies of skeletal remains from food-producing and herding communities of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age of prehistoric South Asia. Robusticity of postcranial bones of the Gangetic Mesolithic populations is likely due to markers of occupational stress (MOS) rather than to variables of latitudes and climates, or to a single indicial category of anthropometric measurements—the Robusticity Index.

Sedentism and food production in early complex societies of the Soconusco, Mexico

This paper presents a case study of the relationship between increasing plant use, sedentism and political complexity among societies on the Pacific coast of southern Mexico during the Early and Middle Formative period (1600–800 bce). I argue that each of these variables increased at different paces in the region. Some of the earliest ceramics in Mesoamerica are documented by 1600 bce as is increasingly sedentary village life. During the following centuries a number of political centres rose and fell. While macrobotanical remains of numerous domestic plant species have been recovered from Early Formative and earlier Archaic period contexts, the overall diet was very broad based with extensive resources exploited from the nearby swamp and estuary systems. Isotopic, ground stone and iconographic data all indicate that the subsistence base underwent a marked transformation during the Middle Formative Conchas phase (900–800 bce) which corresponds to an environmental shift to stable, moist conditions conducive to increased plant production. Therefore, there was over half a millennium during which ceramic-using, horticultural villagers developed political rank prior to the adoption of agriculture and evidence of the first stratified political organization in the region. Evidence from the Soconusco is reviewed and new data are presented from the site of Cuauhtémoc, which was occupied through the entire 800-year period in question.

Environmental and health benefits of hunting lifestyles and diets for the Innu of Labrador

The Innu of northern Labrador, Canada have undergone profound transitions in recent decades with important implications for conservation, food and health policy. The change from permanent nomadic hunting, gathering and trapping in ‘the country’ ( nutshimit) to sedentary village life (known as ‘sedentarisation’) has been associated with a marked decline in physical and mental health. The overarching response of the national government has been to emphasize village-based and institutional solutions. We show that changing the balance back to country-based activities would address both the primary causes of the crisis and improve the health and well-being of the Innu. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with Innu older people ( Tshenut), empirical data on nutrition and activity, and comparative data from the experiences of other indigenous peoples, we identify pertinent biological and environmental transitions of significance to the current plight of the Innu. We show that nutrition and physical activity transitions have had major negative impacts on individual and community health. However, hunting and its associated social and cultural forms is still a viable option as part of a mixed livelihood and economy in the environmentally significant boreal forests and tundra of northern Labrador. Cultural continuity through Innu hunting activities is a means to decelerate, and possibly reverse, their decline. We suggest four new policy areas to help restore country-based activities: (i) a food policy for country food; (ii) an outpost programme; (iii) ecotourism; and (iv) an amended school calendar. Finally, we indicate the implications of our analysis for people in other countries.

Building houses, framing concepts, constructing worlds

The thesis proposed here is that architecture exploded in the early Neolithic of southwest Asia as a novel and powerful system of symbolic representation, the scaffolding of a pre-literate mode of external symbolic storage. The ability to construct settlements, houses and public buildings that represented constructs of the world that they inhabited allowed new kinds of human society to evolve. By comparing the long Epipalaeolithic period and the trend towards sedentary village life with the rich architectural symbolism of the early Neolithic, we establish the archaeological grounds on which the interpretations are to be founded. Contemporary architects, anthropologists and respected modern social thinkers agree that architecture is indeed a very powerful form of symbolic representation. However, we need to establish why the capacity of human societies to produce such concrete symbolic forms should arise at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene period. The answer, it is argued, is to be found in theories of the evolution of the human mind, and particularly in the co-evolution of human cognitive faculties and culture. The work of the psychologist Merlin Donald is of fundamental importance in this regard, especially his ideas concerning external symbolic storage systems. Architecture as a mode of external symbolic storage allowed Neolithic communities to become the first humans to inhabit a "built environment " rich in symbolic meaning, making possible the emergence of new, larger and more complex forms of social organization.

Paleoecological perspectives on human adaptation in central Panama. II the Holocene

AbstractA 17.5 m sedimentary core from Lake La Yeguada, central Panama provides the first complete Holocene sequence for the Pacific watershed of Lower Central America. Phytolith, pollen, and charcoal records document a long lowland history of foraging and food production. Human modification of tropical forests can be described as systematic during the early Holocene and was possibly associated with small‐scale (garden?) horticulture involving native tubers. The incorporation of seed crops like maize and development of slash and burn techiques for larger‐scale field systems is indicated by the increase of secondary forest taxa and removal of primary trees between 7000 and 4000 years ago. After this time, agricultural intensification in an essentially deforested landscape proceeded to the point where, by the time of Christ, agricultural abandonment of the lake watershed may have occurred as a result of loss of soil fertility. Events such as this in the interfluve forests may have, in part, precipitated the coalescence of population and settlement around the river valleys and the emergence of sedentary village life.

The Prehistory of Syria

Archaeological research has established that Syria played a central role in prehistoric cultural development in southwest Asia. Its location at the junction of routes from Africa, Europe, and Asia made it a focus of cultural innovation and spread. Syria was first inhabited about a million years ago by early humans who came from Africa. There was considerable human activity in Syria during the Middle Palaeolithic (ca. 80,000-35,000 years ago), and occupation was continuous thereafter. Syria was an important center for the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago. It witnessed the domestication of several species of plants and animals and the beginning of sedentary village life. The heartland of the succeeding Halaf culture was in north Syria. Its development marked the transition to more complex cultural patterns and, ultimately, to the emergence of urban civilization after 3000 B. C.

Peten: An Archaeological Site Prediction Technique

The present-day boundaries of Guatemala and nearby areas, including the Yucatan, encompass the Maya, whose presence can be traced to 2,500 B.C. (Coe: 1966). The Maya have experienced a great part of general evolution, passing from the hunter and gatherer to agricultural/technological levels; they have organized as bands, tribes, and chiefdoms and now live within a modern nation state. Throughout this progression they have had to contend with forces in the natural environment and still continue to adapt to it with many of the techniques assumed to have been part of their cultural repertoire during the phase of sedentary village life in the area. The lack of settlement pattern studies in the Peten region has produced a situation in which the localized definition of tribal society is not yet complete (Sanders and Price: 1968), and until archaeology unearths the remnants and reflections of their struggle, we will be unable to do more than make broad assumptions about Mayan society and culture in the middle Formative period.