EAA 2023: Abstract

One of the methods for assessing the causes of change in any particular cultural-historical sequence is to see if the factors purporting to drive change in one sequence are equally potent in other sequences where their contexts (the other salient variables) may be quite different. Such cross-cultural approaches were quite common in the mid-twentieth century, though applied more typically to ethnographically known societies than to the long-term sequences of change available to archaeology. Here we apply this logic to understanding the causes for variability in rates of change in wealth inequality through time using Gini coefficients calculated across size distributions of contemporaneous houses from a dozen world regions as our main measure of inequality. These data have been assembled by the members and partners in the GINI (Global Dynamics of INequalIty) project, sponsored by the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, managed through the Center for Collaborative Synthesis, and funded by the US NSF.

Wealth Inequality, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Classical World, Global Archaeology

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Tim Kohler^1,2,3,4

Amy Bogaard^4,5