Sedentary farmers

Anthropologists, whatever the theoretical persuasion and actual interpretation, describe multiple ways in which mobile pastoralists and sedentary farmers may be the same sociopolitical unit and the multiple social-political identities that may be held within the same person. Salzman (2000) describes multiresource pastoralists in Baluchistan Lancaster and Lancaster (1992) do... 

For comparisons of population densities in foraging (hunting and gathering) societies with those of shifting sedentary farmers see Smil, V. 1994. Energy in World History. Boulder Westview, pp. 27, 57-78. 

Soil nutrients removed in farm products must be-re-plenished or the soil becomes impoverished of those nutrients, and plant growth and production from succeeding crops is decreased. From the very beginning of sedentary agriculture, farmers have recognized the basic problem of nutrient depletion. On all continents slash... 

So the Arslantepe tomb is symptomatic of a process that becomes very pronounced in the Middle to Upper Euphrates (and elsewhere) late in the second quarter of the third millennium - the demarcation of territory through particularized burials - and it may be proposed that at least some of the variation manifest in these burials is correlative with variation in details of sociopolitical organization and/or land tenure practices (Porter 2000). This is an outcome of the breakdown of the southern system of interconnection at the end of the fourth millennium and was probably, at least in part, even its cause - not because ever-incipient conflict between nomad and farmer at last burst forth, so that states declined and tribes now reappeared to take their place, but because ancestral groups became so defined that the system fragmented in a very particular way. The different communities created through this process, communities still consisting of sedentary and mobile components, claimed their own sociopolitical space and territorial definition. 

---