Settling down and living together: diet, health, and community

Sedentism, the business of living together in one place for all or most of the year, is known to have developed in some parts of the world in the late Pleistocene, one oft-quoted example being the campsite at Ohalo on the Sea of Galilee in the Jordan valley, dated to around 19,000 years ago, which was probably occupied for several months a year.^[7] The same is probably true of some substantial settlements - villages, in effect - sustained just by hunting, gathering, and in particular fishing, for example in resource-rich estuaries on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe.^[8] However, while not all societies practis­ing forms of agriculture were sedentary, particularly if they combined these with hunting and/or gathering, a developed commitment to farming in many regions of the world was associated with living together in more or less permanent agglomerated settlements.

In Chapter 4 Charlotte Roberts reviews the contribution of scientific techniques clustered under the general term ‘bioarchaeology' to examine the impact of agriculture on diet, health, and the human lifespan. Using the macroscopic examination of skeletal material (including teeth), DNA analy­sis, imaging techniques, stable isotopic studies, and other techniques, it has been possible to compare the health, diet, and range of diseases present in pre-agricultural and agricultural communities. The clear conclusion is that farming in permanently settled, densely populated communities was not ‘easy street'. Diets did not improve with the transition to agriculture. The pathways to agriculture were littered with problems too numerous to

overlook: refuse disposal, vermin, contamination of water supplies, poor hygiene and sanitation levels, poor harvests, and soil exhaustion frequently resulted in a decline in the variety, quantity, and quality of foodstuffs avail­able.

For all its negative unintended consequences, however, for many societies agriculture provided the platform for an increasingly coherent, structured, and narrow-based social world that proved remarkably resilient as a social form.^[10] In Chapter 5 Amy Bogaard describes the material culture created by agricultural communities, such as field boundaries, rice paddy systems, terracing, and raised beds; biological data such as flora (e.g. crop residues and weeds) and butchered animal bone; and other landscape markers such as funerary monuments. In combination these reveal evidence not only of agricultural decision-making but more generally the social life of early farm­ers and their ‘communities of practice' in different parts of the world. Forms of collective action and culturally specific behaviour (sometimes based on age or gender) can be examined to help us reconstruct the social and physical landscapes as they were transformed by agriculturalists. What emerges from her discussion of ‘communities of practice' of farming societies in selected regions (Southwest Asia, Europe, China, Korea, Mesoamerica, and the south­west of North America) is that, though nuclear families emerged as the characteristic residential unit in many regions of the world, and most house­hold farming tended to involve high labour inputs, sedentary village life based on early forms of agriculture could and did take many forms: the emergence of households, compounds, and communally shared spaces dif­fered greatly across Eurasia and the Americas. At the same time, inbuilt in long-term investments in land were issues of ownership and inheritance which provided the seedbed for emergent inequalities.