This project focuses on the subsistence strategies of Early Neolithic communities that inhabited the upland region of South Bohemia. Its results reveal a distinctive trajectory for this peripheral area that was colonised significantly later, brought incoming farmers into close contact with hunter-gatherers and made them adapt their conservative farming practices.

Revivals of public interest in the Neolithic Near East have generally coincided with the emergence of powerful imagery, such as the discovery of Çatalhöyük’s striking wall paintings in the 1960s. Now, sixty years later, the sculptures of Göbekli Tepe are ensuring the period’s widespread appeal. The capacity of these well-preserved buildings to carry such imagery until today has made them, in turn, an image of the supposed achievements of Neolithic sedentism. But the popularity of these images depends on their decontextualization. This modernist notion that permanent architecture represents the conquest of spatial forms over time is in contradiction with the early Neolithic experience of settled life, which had more to do with the unstable duration of places than with an emancipation from motion. This essay explores the Neolithic preference for earth architecture over more stable construction materials such as stone, its influence on visual culture, and how it contributed to building new living relations to the inhabited landscape. Instead of the sense of fixity and completeness that we, moderns, desperately seek in plans, reconstructions, and monumentality, it is the very transience, repetitiveness, and cumulativeness of earth that determined the transformations of the archaeological record. In other words, rhythms are key to understanding Neolithic sedentism in ways that differ wildly from the static images we have substituted for it.

In the archaeological tradition of what is today Peru, studies of sedentary agricultural groups have accorded a minor role to the analysis of stone tools relative to other suites of material culture. Here, we illustrate the value of such lithic collections via a case study of settlement sites from the Chachapoyas region of northern Peru (AD 300–1500). This study demonstrates the potential of methods such as use-wear microscopy and raw material analysis to address questions of theoretical interest to archaeologists studying sedentary society, such as subsistence, household behavior, and ceremonial practices. A set of generalized linear models of the spatial distribution of volcanic stone indicates that lithic raw material acquisition at these ceramic period sites was likely embedded in other activities. In addition, we examine an unusual set of limestone and carbonate-patinated artifacts that suggest that lithic procurement and selection were informed and strategic, if not conforming to expected technological priorities. We suggest that, by taking the potential value of lithic artifacts into consideration from project design through field collection and assemblage sampling, researchers can minimize biases that may otherwise limit the value of lithic assemblages.

The shift to sedentary lifeways represents a significant change in human adaptation. Despite the broadly contemporaneous timing of this transition across East Asia during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, such changes varied regionally. This article synthesises new and existing data from Neolithic sites on the Mongolian Plateau to reveal a simultaneous shift towards investment in site architecture, with distinct variation in the organisation of settlement and subsistence across biogeographic zones. The development of sedentary communities here emphasises the importance of climatic amelioration for incipient sedentism, and demonstrates how differences in ecological and cultural contexts can encourage various responses to the same environmental stimuli.

The Palaeolithic–Neolithic transition in East Asia is characterised by the transformation of mobile hunter-gatherer groups into sedentary communities. The existence of ‘ice-age’ pottery in the Japanese archipelago, however, is inconsistent with claims that directly link climatic warming with sedentism and the development of ceramics. Here, the authors reconsider the chronology and palaeoenvironment of the Maedakochi site in Tokyo. New AMS dating and environmental data suggest that intensified inland fishing in cold environments, immediately prior to the Late Glacial warm period, created conditions conducive to sedentism and the development of subsistence-related pottery.

Hafting is an important part of lithic technology that can increase our understanding of socioeconomic behavior in the past. In this article, we develop a holistic approach to studying hafting by using the concept of curation within a broader assessment of lithic technological organization in early villages. Early villages were loci of socioeconomic transformation as part of the shift from mobile foraging to more sedentary cultivation lifeways. We suggest that an examination of hafting can provide new insights into how early villagers negotiated technological requirements, economic decision making, and social interactions in these novel contexts. As a case study, we develop a curation index and apply it to an archaeological context of hafted and unhafted pointed tools from the early Neolithic village of Dhra’, Jordan. This curation index allows for a discussion of the technological, economic, and social dimensions of hafting strategies at Dhra’. The presence of multiple hafting traditions within early Neolithic villages of Southwest Asia is evidence of persistent social segmentation despite food storage and ritual practices that emphasized communal integration. Through the lens of lithic technological organization, we demonstrate that hafting and curation patterns can increase our understanding of technological, economic, and social strategies in early villages.

We compare domestic architectural features in New England and the Maritime Peninsula to investigate the relationship between the adoption of horticulture and its relationship to social and settlement change during the Woodland Period. Horticulture was not practiced on the Maritime Peninsula until after European contact, despite cultural and environmental similarity to New England. In New England, horticulture has been implicated in profound social and settlement changes. However, aggregated villages, a unit typically investigated for evidence of social change, have proven elusive in the archaeological record. We compiled and analyzed a dataset of dwelling features instead of relying on identifiable villages. This novel quantitative approach uses dwelling feature shape and size as a proxy for social and settlement change, considering these changes at the scale of the house. We find that, during the Woodland Period, dwelling size was overall slightly larger in New England than on the Maritime Peninsula, but ranges heavily overlapped. After the introduction of horticulture, however, dwellings in New England grew in size overall and assumed bimodally distinct larger and smaller forms, which likely necessitated a restructuring of social and economic behavior. This pattern correlates maize horticulture with changes in social and economic lifestyle in Late Woodland New England.

Research on Late Bronze Age relations between Egyptians and local nomadic or semi-nomadic Libyans has hitherto focused almost exclusively on Egyptian textual and iconographic sources. Recent archaeological evidence for grain production and agrarian practice at the Egyptian fortress of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham allows us to address this imbalance, in combination with ethnographic data and cross-cultural parallels drawn from nomad-sedentary interactions in the Near East. Results suggest that Egyptian subsistence in this relatively isolated outpost of the New Kingdom Empire was probably dependent upon Libyan manpower and their knowledge of local environmental conditions and effective farming methods.

This paper examines interactions between co-occupants of riverine niches in north-west Europe during the Late Upper Palaeolithic using both ecological and archaeological data. It is argued that consideration of both the Lateglacial record and autecology of eel, beaver and horse supports a reinterpretation of some famous but enigmatic panels of Magdalenian mobiliary art as representations of eel fishing, along with horse and beaver exploitation in disturbed riverine habitats. It is further suggested that this constitutes a humanly co-constructed niche in ecological, nutritional, and symbolic terms, which was also particularly advantageous for human well-being and social development in this time and place.

The Neolithic in the central Balkans saw dramatic changes in settlement forms, architecture, and material culture, with substantial, often long-lived settlements that can reasonably be called villages emerging in the later part of the period. This paper examines the role of herding practices in the development of these large, more-or-less settled communities. Radiocarbon results (including twenty-seven new AMS dates from Gomolava, Opovo, and Petnica) are used to place the available zooarchaeological data into a chronological framework, allowing comparison of inter- and intra-site changes across the region. The data point to the development of large-scale cattle herding in the later Neolithic, the implications of which for mobility and community cohesion are discussed. This trend is seen clearly over time at certain sites but, like the settlement evidence, is neither universal nor synchronous across the region, emphasizing that change occurred, and should be understood, on the level of individual communities.

A newly discovered site at Shangshan in the Lower Yangzi River region has revealed the oldest open-air sedentary village and domesticated rice in south China.