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Inanthropology,sedentism (sometimes calledsedentariness; comparesedentarism[1]) is the practice of living in one place for a long time. As of 2025, the large majority of people belong to sedentary cultures. Inevolutionary anthropology and archaeology,sedentism takes on a slightly different sub-meaning, often applying to the transition fromnomadic society to alifestyle that involves remaining in one place permanently. Essentially, sedentism means living in groups permanently in one place.[2] Theinvention of agriculture led to sedentism in many cases, but the earliest sedentary settlements were pre-agricultural.
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For small-scale nomadic societies it can be difficult to adopt a sedentary lifestyle in a landscape without on-siteagricultural orlivestock breeding resources, since sedentism often requires sufficient year-round, easily accessible local natural resources.
Non-agricultural sedentism requires good preservation and storage technologies, such as smoking, drying, andfermentation, 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 in locations where the resources of several major ecosystems overlapped that the earliest non-agricultural sedentism occurred. For example, people settled where a river met the sea, atlagoon environments along the coast, at river confluences, or where flatsavanna met hills, and mountains with rivers.
In archaeology a number of criteria must hold for the recognition of either semi or full sedentism.
According to archaeologistOfer Bar-Yosef, they are as follows:[3][4]
1. Increasing presence of organisms that benefit from human sedentary activities, e.g.
2.Cementum increments on mammal teeth
3. Energy expenditure
In many mammals dark cementum is deposited during winter when food is scarce and light cementum is deposited in the summer when food is abundant, so the outermost cementum layer shows at which season the animal was killed. Thus, if animals were killed year-round in some area it suggests that people were sedentary there.[5]
The first sedentary sites were pre-agricultural, and they appeared during theUpper Paleolithic inMoravia and on theEast European Plain between c. 25000–17000 BC.[6] In theLevant, theNatufian culture was the first to become sedentary at around 12000 BC. The Natufians were sedentary for more than 2000 years before they, at some sites, started to cultivate plants around 10000 BC.[7] A year-round sedentary site, with its larger population, generates a substantial demand on locally provided natural resources, a demand that may have triggered the development of deliberate agriculture.
TheJōmon culture inJapan, which was primarily a coastal culture, was sedentary from c. 12000 to 10000 BC, before the cultivation of rice at some sites in northernKyushu.[8][9] In northernmostScandinavia, there areseveral early sedentary sites without evidence of agriculture or cattle breeding. They appeared from c. 5300–4500 BC[10] and are all located optimally in the landscape for utilization of major ecosystem resources;[citation needed] for example, theLillberget Stone Age village site (c. 3900 BC), theNyelv site (c. 5300 BC), and theLake Inari site (c. 4500 BC).[citation needed] In northernSweden the earliest indication of agriculture occurs at previously sedentary sites, and one example is theBjurselet site used during the period c. 2700–1700 BC, famous for its large caches of long distance tradedflint axes fromDenmark andScania (some 1300 km). The evidence ofsmall-scale agriculture at that site can be seen from c. 2300 BC (burnt cereals of barley).
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Sedentism increased contacts andtrade, and the firstMiddle East cereals and cattle inEurope could have spread through a stepping-stone process, where the productive gifts (cereals, cattle, sheep and goats) were exchanged through a network of large pre-agricultural sedentary sites (rather than through a wave of an advancing 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 to 1 percent of these represented villages with more than 3 to 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 newsubsistence-strategies, specifically moving fromforaging (hunter-gatherer) toagricultural andanimaldomestication. The development of sedentism led to the rise of population aggregation and the formation ofvillages,cities, and othercommunity types.
Deleuze and Guattari detect a trend in mental bias resulting from sedentism: "History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads."[11]
In South America, sedentism may date from 5500 BC.[12]
InNorth America, evidence for sedentism emerges around 4500 BC.[citation needed]
Forced sedentism orsedentarization 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 modern society has imposed demands that have pushed aboriginal populations to adopt a fixed habitat.
At the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century many previously nomadic tribes turned to permanent settlement. It was a process initiated by local governments, and it was mainly a global trend forced by the changes in the attitude to the land and real property and also due to state policies that complicated border crossing. Among these nations areNegev Bedouin inJordan,Israel andEgypt,[13]Bashkirs,Kyrgyz,Kazakhs,Evenks,Evens,Sakha in theSoviet Union, someKurdish tribes inTurkey,Tibetan nomads inChina,[14]Babongo inGabon,Baka inCameroon,[15]Innu inCanada,Romani inRomania andCzechoslovakia, etc.
As a result of forced sedentarization, many rich herdsmen inSiberia have been eliminated by deliberate overtaxation or imprisonment, year-round mobility has been discouraged, many smaller sites and family herd camps have been shut down, children have been separated from their parents and taken to boarding schools. This caused severe social, cultural and psychological issues toIndigenous peoples of Siberia.[16][17]
This assumption that civilized peoples were largely immobile has sometimes been labeled as sendentarying or sedentarism.
In coastal Peru, some permanent marine-oriented villages (e.g., Paloma) were evidently established as early as 5500 B.C.
The dictionary definition ofsedentism at Wiktionary| International | |
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