In evolutionary anthropology and archaeology, sedentism (sometimes denominated sedentariness), is a term applied to the transition from nomadic to permanent, year-round settlement.
Both situations require good preservation and storage technologies. For example cooking, smoking, drying and fermenting of foods, 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 at locations where the resources of several major ecosystems overlapped that enabled the earliest sedentism to occur (pre-agricultural sedentism). For example where a river met the sea, at lagoon environments along the coast, at river confluences, or where flat savanna met hills and mountains with rivers.
The Jomon culture in Japan, which was primarily a coastal culture, was sedentary from c. 12000 to 10000 BC until the cultivation of rice at some sites in northern Kyushu. In northernmost Scandinavia, there are several early sedentary sites without evidence of agriculture or cattle breeding. They appear from c. 5300-4500 BC and are all located optimally in the landscape for extraction of major ecosystem resources. In Sweden (the Lillberget Stone Age village site c. 3900 BC) represents such a site, in Norway (the Nyelv site c. 5300 BC, and in Finland (the Enare träsk site, c. 4500 BC). In northern Sweden the earliest indication of agriculture occurs at previously sedentary sites, and one example is the Bjurselet site used during the period c. 2700-1700 BC, famous for its large caches of long distance traded flint axes from Denmark and southernmost Sweden (some 1300 km). The evidence of small scale agriculture at that site can be seen from c. 2300 BC (burnt cereals of barley).
The shift to sedentism is coupled with the adoption of new subsistence strategies, specifically from foraging (hunter-gatherer) to agricultural and animal domestication. The development of sedentism led to the rise of population aggregation and formation of villages, cities, and other community types.
In North America, evidence for sedentism emerges around 4500 BC.
There are many examples of forced sedentarization with detrimental effects on minority groups in developed countries. This is mainly caused by lack of sufficient integration into the greater society, old traditions and identity withering and the broken travel cycle of the year, meaning that there may be lack of jobs and activity through significant parts of the year leaving the population reliant on government funded programs.
This can cause great social decline, and also weaken the ethnic identity of the population affected, as examples show of North American indigenous peoples such as the Inuit in the mid-20th century.
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