Problems of Recognizing Earliest Sedentism

The Natufian Example

Abstract

Natufian period settlements have been proposed as key examples of pre-agricultural sedentism. This paper examines that proposition and concludes that Natufian residential sites are as likely to represent the residues of a semi-mobile mode of settlement. However, the main point to be made here is that a rigorous methodology for distinguishing between the prehistoric settlement remains of sedentary, semi-mobile and mobile hunter-gatherers is lacking. Investigation into the rates at which sedimentation occurs, and into the practice of superposition of building units in both ethnographic transhumant and sedentary villages is seen as a fruitful avenue of research on this subject.