Sedentism, remaining in one place throughout the year, was first identified as a necessary precursor to agriculture in the 1960s (Binford 1968; Wright 1971; Flannery 1973), and although it is no longer considered a simple equation, the link between sedentism and agriculture in the Near East persists today (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1989). Clearly, sedentism can create ‘‘positive feedback.’’ Early semisedentary sites already had greater densities of artifacts than did Paleolithic sites (before 18,000 bce) of mobile peoples, along with more non-portables such as storage facilities, grinding stones, burials, and increasingly substantial architecture (Byrd 1989). Sedentism promoted acquisition, and object ownership meant reluctance to move on and leave things behind. Sedentism had a corollary in increased group size, as female fertility increased and birth spacing and mortality decreased. Larger numbers can also mean disinclination to mobility. Further, increased group size can be linked with more complex social relationships. The mortality rates that were most reduced by sedentism were those of infants and the elderly; not only did group size increase but the nature of the group changed. The larger group contained more old individuals with memories and acquired status, and more young individuals with hopes for the future. And this social environment preceded and provided fertile ground for agriculture.
Sedentary farmers had less free time than nomadic hunter-gatherers (Bender 1975). The schedules and concepts of work differed. Farming involved spikes of intensive labor and troughs of free time, and the free time was differently arranged across the year. This new arrangement opened up vistas for non-subsistence activities. But the effects of sedentism and agriculture were not all positive. Reduction of resource diversity could mean greater risk of catastrophe. A restricted-resource agriculture-based diet could mean nutritional deficiencies and dental problems (Smith, Bar-Yosef, and Sillen 1984). The tighter arrangement of sedentary villages and their piles of rubbish (and rats) meant higher rates of infectious disease, and closer contact between humans and animals might favor species-jumping diseases, as organisms associated with animals came into contact with new potential hosts. The repetitive manual labor involved in grain processing could cause skeletal stress (Molleson 2000). Apparently, positives did outweigh negatives, but the persistence of hunting well into the historic periods points out the necessity for keeping alternatives open.
World History
