Content:
There is a growing literature on the development of inequality in prehistory. However, the overall picture is still fuzzy, as detailed evidence from many regions and periods around the world is still lacking. To help complete the picture, we created a dataset by coding rich information from archaeological records on single-funeral burial mounds in prehistoric Central Europe. The dataset contains about 5,000 observations and covers the period from 4000-0 BCE, with a possible temporal resolution of 200 years. Our analyses focus on a particular segment of the population – namely, the segment of those individuals who were buried in burial mounds. This societal segment, we argue, represents an upper part of the social wealth distribution, since the act of building a burial mounds shows the relational wealth and social capital of the deceased and its associated group necessary to mobilize labor and economic goods for such an endeavor.
Employing the volume of a burial mound as a proxy for the social wealth of a buried individual, we find an increasing trend in social inequality over time. The increase, however, is not linear and shows phases of significant increase, stagnation and decrease. Our results show that there is no clear relationship between social inequality among the upper societal segment and other trends in the population, except a general increase. For certain periods, changes in social inequality and changes in other proxy time series, representing population size (e.g. abundance of graves), climate events or sociopolitical organization (e.g. size of collective acting group, conflict), are identical, but there is no consistent pattern, yet.
With providing a time granular, big-picture overview of social inequality in the upper societal segment in prehistoric Central Europe, we could show that inequality among this segment seems to be decoupled from other trends in society.
Co-author:
Johannes Marzian2
Johannes Müller1,3,4
Till Requate3,4