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In anthropology, sedentism (sometimes called sedentariness; compare sedentarism (2025). 9780199729937 ISBN 9780199729937) is the practice of living in one place for a long time. As of 2025, the large majority of people belong to sedentary cultures. In evolutionary anthropology and archaeology, sedentism takes on a slightly different sub-meaning, often applying to the transition from nomadic society to a lifestyle that involves remaining in one place permanently. Essentially, sedentism means living in groups permanently in one place.Kris Hirst, Sedentism The invention of agriculture led to sedentism in many cases, but the earliest sedentary settlements were pre-agricultural.
Non-agricultural sedentism requires good preservation and storage technologies, such as smoking, drying, and fermentation, as well as good containers such as pottery, baskets, or special pits in which to securely store food whilst making it available. It was only in locations where the resources of several major ecosystems overlapped that the earliest non-agricultural sedentism occurred. For example, people settled where a river met the sea, at lagoon environments along the coast, at river confluences, or where flat savanna met hills, and mountains with rivers.
According to archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef, they are as follows:
1. Increasing presence of organisms that benefit from human sedentary activities, e.g.
2. Cementum increments on mammal teeth
In many mammals dark cementum is deposited during winter when food is scarce and light cementum is deposited in the summer when food is abundant, so the outermost cementum layer shows at which season the animal was killed. Thus, if animals were killed year-round in some area it suggests that people were sedentary there.
The Jōmon culture in Japan, which was primarily a coastal culture, was sedentary from c. 12000 to 10000 BC, before the cultivation of rice at some sites in northern Kyushu. Jomon Fantasy: Resketching Japan's Prehistory. June 22, 1999. "Ancient Jomon of Japan", Habu Junko, Cambridge Press, 2004 In northernmost Scandinavia, there are several early sedentary sites without evidence of agriculture or cattle breeding. They appeared from c. 5300–4500 BC New Evidence on the Ertebølle Culture on Rugen and are all located optimally in the landscape for utilization of major ecosystem resources; for example, the Lillberget Stone Age village site (c. 3900 BC), the Nyelv site (c. 5300 BC), and the Lake Inari site (c. 4500 BC). In northern Sweden the earliest indication of agriculture occurs at previously sedentary sites, and one example is the Bjurselet site used during the period c. 2700–1700 BC, famous for its large caches of long distance traded from Denmark and Scania (some 1300 km). The evidence of small-scale agriculture at that site can be seen from c. 2300 BC (burnt cereals of barley).
The shift to sedentism is coupled with the adoption of new subsistence-strategies, specifically moving from foraging (hunter-gatherer) to agriculture and animal domestication. The development of sedentism led to the rise of population aggregation and the formation of , cities, and other community types.
Deleuze and Guattari detect a trend in mental bias resulting from sedentism: "History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads."
(1987). 9780816614011, University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816614011
In South America, sedentism may date from 5500 BC.
In North America, evidence for sedentism emerges around 4500 BC.
At the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century many previously nomadic tribes turned to permanent settlement. It was a process initiated by local governments, and it was mainly a global trend forced by the changes in the attitude to the land and real property and also due to state policies that complicated border crossing. Among these nations are Negev Bedouin in Jordan, Israel and Egypt, The Sedentarization of the Bedouin People Bashkirs, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhs, Evenks, Evens, Sakha people in the Soviet Union, some Kurds tribes in Turkey, Tibetan people nomads in China, Sedentarization of Tibetan Nomads Babongo in Gabon, Baka in Cameroon, Innu in Canada, Gypsies in Romania and Czechoslovakia, etc.
As a result of forced sedentarization, many rich herdsmen in Siberia have been eliminated by deliberate overtaxation or imprisonment, year-round mobility has been discouraged, many smaller sites and family herd camps have been shut down, children have been separated from their parents and taken to boarding schools. This caused severe social, cultural and psychological issues to Indigenous peoples of Siberia.
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