63 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Bonomo, S. Archila (eds.), South American Contributions to World Archaeology, One World Archaeology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73998-0_3 Chapter 3 Sedentary Sites Randall Haas Abstract Nearly every part of the world witnessed the process of human sedenta- rization during the Holocene Epoch. Agriculture, circumscription, and ecological structure are among the major drivers previously proposed to account for this transi- tion from residentially mobile to sedentary lifeways. This analysis explores an alter- native mechanism, which considers the appearance of continuously occupied sites among residentially mobile (i.e., non-sedentary) individuals to be a key component in the trajectory to sedentism. Drawing insights from Archaic Period settlement pat- terns in the high Andes and a simple computer simulation, such “sedentary sites” are shown to be an emergent property of the interaction of two basic human behav- iors—population growth and recursive mobility. Recursive mobility refers to the preferential occupation of certain places on landscapes as a result of human restruc- turing of environments and consequent recycling of cultural materials. The simula- tions reveal gradual emergence of continuously occupied sites by residentially mobile individuals, which accounts for the protracted nature sedentarization observed archaeologically. The model further offers a socioecological context for emergent residential sedentism among individuals themselves and a mechanism for plant domestication that does not require individual sedentism. Keywords Mobility · Sedentism · Foragers · Emergent agriculture · Andean archaic · Lake Titicaca Basin · Simulation Nearly all of the world’s contemporary human populations are what anthropologists would consider residentially sedentary. Individuals tend to inhabit sites year-round for many sequential years and even multiple generations in some instances. Anthropology long-ago showed that this wasn’t always the case. Throughout the Pleistocene, the vast majority of humans were residentially mobile, moving at least once a year, often more frequently. During the Holocene, residentially mobile R. Haas (*) Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA e-mail: wrhaas@ucdavis.edu