Ambiguity and the Self-Evident in the Study of Sedentism

Abstract

The thesis considers the basis and the logic of the propositions made in the past 300 years about the transition from a mobile lifestyle to a sedentary one, assessing the propositions in relation to their intellectual milieu. No particular position is defended or legitimated, nor is the study an attempt to create new definitions of sedentism or to seek to identify new indicators of sedentism in the archaeological record. Instead it considers how other people have sought to do this, in order to assess whether there has been something inherently problematic in the assumptions and logic that have been used. The study illustrates its point primarily through a review of English language scholarship with some small inclusions of English translations of opinions expressed in other languages. No stabilised, agreed or paradigmatic theories exist concerning a shift to sedentism, despite that transition being a major change in human behaviour, partially associated with the expansion of agricultural economies and integral to the development of urban life and the huge population increases of the last 8,000 years. Notwithstanding the scale and importance of the phenomenon, with a few notable exceptions, theorising on the subject has involved both ambiguity and the apparently self-evident. There is considerable ambiguity in English language definitions about what constitutes sedentism, and this becomes more complicated when definitions and opinions from other languages and cultural backgrounds are incorporated. The terminology and classifications used by scholars have been, and still are, ambiguous, and this makes any “answer” problematic because the various opinions and debates do not refer consistently to the same phenomena or to their relationship to other components of human behaviour. There are also differences in regional interpretations. Several interrelated debates and topics add to the complexities and ambiguities, such as the relationship between sedentism and agriculture, the nature and residential behaviour of complex hunter-gatherer communities and the characteristics of pastoralism. The “self-evident” component had its genesis in the 18th century, when social philosophers proposed linear progression models of human development, which have had a continuing influence on archaeological assumptions about the process of becoming sedentary. By the later part of the 20th century some scholars were re-engaging with the issue and reassessing these assumptions, but the fundamentals are still not resolved, despite scholars often writing as if they are. Additional problems further complicate the study of the formation of sedentary communities. Unlike other aspects of human behaviour, there is no comparable theory or empirical data on sedentising in other animal species. This has meant that archaeological theorists cannot either “borrow” theory from the biological sciences or test their predicates against its evidence. There are also difficulties with the use of ethnographic analogy to retrodict recent sedentising trends to the conditions prevailing at the time societies initially became sedentary. The problem is that the previous circumstances must logically be considered to have differed from current and recent circumstances in which people making a transition to sedentary life already know about other people who are sedentary. There is, of course, a difference between the processes involved in a community becoming settled, or sedentising, and the state of a community residing in one place, or being sedentary, often referred to as sedentism. Becoming sedentary was a process, not an instantaneous change. The majority of communities around the world became sedentary before writing or other recording systems were introduced. It is not, therefore, possible to directly study the social processes through which communities became sedentary, only what remains in the archaeological record. The archaeological signatures of the transition continue to be a topic of inconclusive debate despite the recent use of new analytic technologies. An operational analysis will be necessary, to consider what sedentism actually was at the time of the initial transitions, rather than defining it in contrast to something else. To proceed further with a coherent analysis of sedentising will likely need the discovery of an unequivocal marker, possibly biomechanical or biochemical, for a newly sedentary population before any agreement can be reached on the definition of sedentism. A universally agreed definition of what is meant by the terms “sedentism” and “becoming sedentary” in the prehistoric context is required for future investigations to be coherent and a more cohesive concept of sedentism to be actualised.