This “isolation” idea came out of people’s efforts to explain why hunting and gathering might have persisted in the face of what many people used to believe were more productive options like farming and pastoralism. The idea that the hunting and gathering economy might be able to compete as an economic option did not seem feasible to many earlier scholars. I also take exception to the “harsh environments” idea, actually.

I think our ideas on this are at a cross-roads. If we assume that human beings are always going to settle whenever a dense resource like Salmon runs or wild wheat presents itself, or, more recently to grow food when presented with suitable climate and soils, or to prefer pastoralism to foraging where it is possible to keep domesticated livestock, we follow a model that assumes that hunting and gathering is less attractive in areas of rich soils and moderate climates than are other economic options.

We also assume that up until just recently, that is, until about 10,000 years ago, most human being were not bright enough to figure this out. After all, apparently modern Homo sapiens sapiens, in most of Africa, even in the middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia, spent a fair amount of time farting around as foragers (upwards of 100,000 years, by all received theory). The suggestion that a more settled way of life might actually be preferred even in the absence of agriculture needs to be carefully distinguished from assumptions that sedentism in any way affected the mode of production and distribution. In other words, if somewhat long term (say, several years) settlements exist and are supported by the proceeds from “windfall” hunting or foraging (whether animal or vegetable), does this automatically make the culture different from that of more mobile foragers?

I can think of several open questions here: the first of course, is the idea that a “permanent settlement” means that nobody is mobile. I suggest that even permanent settlements such as today’s urban cities can have a fairly mobile population. A pattern of reciprocal resource use between communities occupying different ranges, mediated by the often social mechanisms of mobility undertaken to avoid conflict, visit relatives, share in a healing ceremony, and attend dances and other courtship related events, continue to operate even in sedentary situations. I do not even have to gather much supporting evidence of this from sedentary hunter-gatherers, since such resource use strategies and social mechanisms have survived sedentism in virtually every human economy. Granted, in some cases where there is a high level of population density, opportunities to move freely (to share in resources, especially) sometimes become constrained.

What I am suggesting is that the existence of evidence of permanent occupation of some locales does not automatically imply that people were not mobile. In fact, it may not correlate with low mobility at all. It may simply show that when people were living in a particular part of a range, they generally stayed in certain permanent structures (caves or walled shelters) because it was more efficient to do so than to build each time anew.

We have to be very careful in thinking that permanent settlement automatically means ownership of structures or resources. The idea that certain assets become inherited within a corporate group, (lineage or clan) implies a hierarchy of rights to these resources will exist, and a certain core population will tend to occupy the permanent settlement. However, it is a big stretch to assume that the change in a system of kinship and the hierarchy of access was something that happened very quickly. The settlements along the NorthWest coast of North America were permanent for a long time before Boas went to study them, and yet, despite his best efforts to categorize their kinship and access to resources according to known systems of lineal descent, he failed, and it was left to later scholars to find that they still had a fundamentally bilateral system – at least in terms of distribution of food and goods.

The idea that Upper Paleolithic people were essentially sedentary because of the richness of their resource base also assumes that they did not need to move their dwellings to exploit a full seasonal round of subsistence activities. Granted, this might have precluded mobility. But why? Only if the advantages of keeping dwellings going over time outweighed the benefits of relocation. Can anyone imagine what might be some benefits of mobility? I can. Fewer fleas, ticks and other parasites, for one thing. A new area designated as the latrine, for another. Avoidance of the ghosts of the dead, who tended to be buried within the settlement or even in the earth inside of their dwelling is another. A shifting pattern of settlement location, even within a fairly constrained home range, also creates a different set of trails and trap lines from the previous year, and allow the area immediate to previous locals to recover ecologically.

Then there are all the benefits of maintaining mobility within a whole populations. Some settlements might be permanent because they are fully occupied at some times of the year by many otherwise mobile smaller groups of people who come together to undertake the joint hunting of some migratory animal. There is plenty of evidence of alternation between small mobile groups and a larger assemblage among hunter-gatherers, and indeed a seasonal disbursal to smaller agricultural areas is widespread among horticultural and pastoral folk as well.

Patterns of visiting and reciprocal resource sharing might not always be needed economically, but still be vital to the social life of the larger community. Desire for trade in nonessentials like jewelry, news, gossip, story telling, healing and other ceremonials play important roles in motivating mobility among all known human groups, let alone hunter-gatherers.

There is also the simple possibility that hunting and gathering, whether mobile or sedentary, is the most highly efficient and sustainable system as long as the human population was low enough to be supported by the gifts of nature. This might explain why the people of the Pacific North West “never adopted agriculture, even when exposed to it”, in addition to why the San informant told Richard Lee “why should we plant, when there are so many mongongos in the world?”

That this system ran on a logic of reciprocal access to resources among neighboring territories, high values placed on sharing, bilateral kinship, fluid group membership, and absence of frequent mutual intra-group hostilities, is not entirely testable with the archaeological data, but some of it is.

The evidence for hostility certainly can be tested for. Evidence of parasite load might be more difficult, but morbidity and mortality data can be used from the skeletal remains. Evidence from dentition might be crucial here. ( See for instance
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~mkjackes/Antiquity.pdf
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~mkjackes/Jackes_violence.pdf

There is also the interesting effect of sedentism on human fertility (via high calorie weaning foods) and population growth to be considered. This would suggest that sedentism around a stored high calorie dietary staple might lead to a period of population growth, which would be followed by increased conflict, malnutrition due to limitations to the diet as local flora and fauna were depleted, and increases in infant and child mortality. From what I have read, it seem this was more characteristic of the late Mesolithic than the Upper Paleolithic, at least in parts of Europe.

I am open to discussion here. I am just not in favor of the whole scale resurrection of the “nasty, brutish, and short” model of mobile hunter-gatherer modes of production and existence.

Just remember that today when we speak of Hunter-Gatherer, we are talking mostly about isolated groups in harsh environments. In the pre-Neolithic, its probable that most Hunter-Gatherers were mostly sedentary for much of the year. And as you say where game abounds – like the Salmon runs of the Pacific NorthWest in the US, people subsisted on fresh fish for much of the year and dried fish for the rest – so they were completely sedentary, and never adopted agriculture, even when exposed to it.

Under such circumstances, it would be foolish for groups to aggress against neighboring groups or to mount any kind of defense of their territory.

Sedentism is also a term that should be used with caution. If by sedentism one means that the population had a fixed village location that remains occupied for generations, then the people can certainty be considered sedentary. But if you merely have a situation where the population is moving around within a limited area in an annual round designed to best exploit the resources within the area, then they cannot be considered sedentary. Under those circumstances they would be like all other mobile hunter-gatherers.

In the Cantabrian strip case, geography also seems to favor semi-sedentarism because it’s rugged and offers a variety of ecological niches (from coast to mountain) in what they could walk in a single day. I think this last aspect is emphasized in the paper.

Also we rely heavily on settlements in caves, what implies certain conditions and limitations. We know that some caves were used only seasonally, while others seem to have been more permanent homes. I also guess that outside of the karstic areas, and even in them when convenient, people would use camps and not rocky shelters. In fact some of them have been found in the Cantabrian strip too, one not far from Bilbao: in Getxo (the map of Magdalenian sites in the paper is quite incomplete, it seems to me).

I imagine anyhow that people in the more open areas of Central and Eastern Europe would anyhow be more mobile, with whichever exceptions.