EAA 2023: Abstract

There is a rich and growing literature that uses the archaeological record of housing to investigate the emergence and consequences of inequality in past societies. Two issues that have not been addressed thus far are: 1) the degree to which variation in housing mirrors patterns of inequality in asset values and incomes in present-day societies, and 2) whether notions of trade-offs between inequality and growth in contemporary economics reflect general dynamics that characterized pre-capitalist societies as well. In this paper I address both issues. I first examine relationships between house areas, house values, and household incomes in the contemporary US using real estate and census data. Then, I examine a database of housing information for Roman Britain to examine the relationship between inequality and development over time. Results show: 1) that inequality is a system-level property that can be estimated using data from a simple random sample of settlements; 2) that house areas generally under-represent levels of inequality based on asset values and incomes; and 3) that increasing inequality in Roman Britain was associated with substantial improvement in the material conditions of life for most households. Together, these results suggest archaeological data can in fact capture the dynamics of inequality in ways that are potentially helpful for the present and future.

Inequality, Living standards, Development, Household archaeology

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Scott Ortman¹