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Seasonality and Sedentism: Archaeological Perspectives from Old and New World Sites, edited by Thomas R. Rocek and Ofer Bar-Yosef. Peabody Museum Bulletin 6. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1998. xiv + 221 pp., 68 figures, 26 tables. Paper. $45.00.
Archaeologists know that some settlements had relatively little residential mobility over long stretches of time, while others may not have been continuously occupied longer than a single season or were occupied only intermittently. This volume concerns how we discern these settlement differences. To a smaller degree, it addresses factors that affect settlement mobility and broader issues of the economic and social (if not ideological) aspects of whole settlement systems.
Readers of BASOR may be most interested in the papers on sites of the Natufian complex in the southern Levant. The volume's papers on work from North and South America, Europe, and Japan, however, address methodological and theoretical issues of interest to Near Eastern archaeologists on any site in which seasonal or periodic occupation is a possibility. In addition, as is evident in Rocek's comparison of Natufian sites with ones from the American Southwest, this international sample of studies frequently shows interesting parallels between the Near East and other parts of the world.
As the editors point out, all human settlements involve some element of mobility. What is at issue is the degree, variety, timing, and role of mobility. In the sites with which Near Eastern archaeologists are most familiar, mobility may commonly involve the movement of people participating in exogamous marriage, the temporary absence of traders or military personnel, or seasonal movement of pastoralists. Most of the papers in this volume, however, involve distinguishing seasonal camps of hunter-foragers from "sedentary" or nearly year-round settlements of complex hunter-gatherers among such cultures as the Natufian complex.
"Seasonality" can refer to the degree to which a settlement is occupied only seasonally (e.g., chapters 4 and 5), to the season in which a particular settlement was occupied, or to the phenology (impact of climate and season) of plants and animals, the remains of which sometimes provide evidence for seasonality in the other two senses. "Sedentism" is defined variably, but often refers to the tendency for a settlement to be occupied, by at least part...