Villages

A village is a relatively stable human community, in terms of location and composition, that is generally [Page 2283]larger than a camp or dispersed hamlet but is smaller than a town or city. Some villages, however, only exist for a few months, as they represent a phase of an annual cycle (for example, the band villages of Kirghiz herders in central Asia). Although the term is commonly used for small agricultural communities, it can also be applied to communities that engage in fishing or other activities such as the production of handicrafts, or that have mixed economies; the latter, in fact, is increasingly the case in many parts of the world. Due to this diversity, it is not always easy to distinguish unequivocally a village from other types of communities.

Anthropologists have long debated the origin and growth of the village. Typical questions have been: Did the village arise because of settled agriculture with a degree of economic specialization, the advent of private proprietorship of land, growth of seigniorial power, or because of consolidation for mutual protection? Did some hamlets coalesce into villages while others did not? Until recently, the emergence of villages was regularly associated with the Neolithic Revolution (dated to about10,000–12,000 years ago). The assumption, promoted by V. Gordon Childe's work, was that humans became more sedentary as they moved from food collection to food production because settled agriculture and the domestication of animals require close contact with fields and herds. As a result, agriculture and village life were considered to go hand in hand. Today many archaeologists have parted company with this model as new research and restudies of former key sites, such as Çatalhöyük, located in central Turkey and about 10,000 years old, point to a more nuanced and complex interpretation.

In southwest Asia, Natufian village sites dating to about 11,000 years ago provide good evidence for a preagricultural tradition of village life based on hunting and the collection of wild grains and nuts. Current archaeological work at Çatalhöyük, some of it spearheaded by Ian Hodder, suggests that this perhaps was an overgrown village without advanced agriculture. The people who inhabited the site depended to a large extent on wild plants and animals, even though they did tend some livestock and grew some crops. Similarly,Asikli, a Central Anatolian site about 1,000 years older than Çatalhöyük, was a large stable settlement with a population that relied mainly on hunting and gathering. In sum, in the Near East some villages emerged before agriculture or before agriculture became the main subsistence strategy. All of this suggests that the transition from foraging to domestication took various paths and that some peoples developed mixed economies that combined reliance on wild and cultivated foods (and, maybe, with periods of no cultivation). This transition, likewise, included various types of communities that reflected different degrees of mobility and population densities. Research in other areas of the world besides the Near East (for example,South America, Mesoamerica, North America, and China), has furthermore revealed that people domesticated plants well before farming villages were established. Therefore, though settled life and agriculture are related, they are not necessarily coterminous.

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