Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-20T09:57:17.921Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Comparing ancient inequalities: the challenges of comparability, bias and precision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2019

Mattia Fochesato ,
Amy Bogaard  and
Samuel Bowles
Mattia Fochesato
Affiliation:
Dondena Centre, Bocconi University, Via Röntgen 1, 20136 Milan, Italy
Amy Bogaard*
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK Behavioral Sciences, Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
Samuel Bowles
Affiliation:
Behavioral Sciences, Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
*
*Author for correspondence (Email: amy.bogaard@arch.ox.ac.uk)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Archaeological evidence provides the only basis for comparative research charting wealth inequality over vast stretches of the human past. But researchers are confronted by a number of problems: small sample sizes; variable indicators of wealth (including individual grave goods, the area of household dwellings or storage spaces); overrepresentation of the wealthy, or invisibility of those without wealth; and vastly different population sizes. Here, the authors develop methods for estimating the Gini coefficient—a measure of wealth inequality—that address these challenges, allowing them to provide a set of 150 comparable estimates of ancient wealth inequality.

Keywords

wealth inequalityhouseholdstoragegrave goodsGini coefficient
Type
Research
Information
Antiquity , Volume 93 , Issue 370 , August 2019 , pp. 853 - 869
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Atkinson, A. & Piketty, T.. (ed.). 2007. Top incomes over the twentieth century: a contrast between continental Europe and English-speaking countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bogaard, A., Fochesato, M. & Bowles, S.. In press. The farming-inequality nexus: new methods and archaeological evidence. Antiquity 93.Google Scholar
Bogucki, P. 1999. The origins of human society. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gudeman, S. & Rivera, A.. 1990. Conversations in Colombia: the domestic economy in life and text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511558009Google Scholar
Herlihy, D. & Klapisch-Zuber, C.. 1985. Tuscans and their families: a study of the Florentine catasto of 1427. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kohler, T.A. & Higgins, R.. 2016. Quantifying household inequality in Early Pueblo villages. Current Anthropology 57: 690–97. https://doi.org/10.1086/687982Google Scholar
Kohler, T.A. & Smith, M.. (ed.). 2018. Ten thousand years of inequality: the archaeology of wealth differences. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Kohler, T.A. et al. 2017. Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica. Nature 551: 619–22. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24646Google Scholar
Kuznets, S. 1965. Economic growth and income inequality. American Economic Review 65: 1–28.Google Scholar
McGuire, R.H. 1992. Death, society and ideology in a Hohokam community. Boulder (CO): Westview.Google Scholar
Morris, I. 2010. Why the West rules—for now. The patterns of history, and what they reveal about the future. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Google Scholar
Nadel, D. 2003. The Ohalo II brush huts and the dwelling structures of the Natufian and PPNA sites in the Jordan Valley. Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 1: 34–48.Google Scholar
Nummela, I. 2011. Regional inequality, in Lamberg, M.H. & Haikari, J. (ed.) Physical and cultural space in pre-industrial Europe. Methodological approaches to spatiality: 335–74. Lund: Nordic Academic.Google Scholar
Peterson, C.E. & Drennan, R.D.. 2018. Letting the Gini out of the bottle: measuring inequality archaeologically, in Kohler, T.A. & Smith, M.E. (ed.) Ten thousand years of inequality: the archaeology of wealth differences: 39–66. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20d8801.5Google Scholar
Porčić, M. 2018. Evaluating social complexity and inequality in the Balkans between 6500 and 4200 BC. Journal of Archaeological Research 2018: 1–56. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-9126-6Google Scholar
Prentiss, A.M., Foor, T.A. & Murphy, M.-M.. 2018. Testing hypotheses about emergent inequality (using Gini coefficients) in a complex fisher-forager society at the Bridge River site, British Columbia, in Kohler, T.A. & Smith, M.E. (ed.) Ten thousand years of inequality: the archaeology of wealth differences: 96–129. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20d8801.7Google Scholar
Scheidel, W. 2017. The great leveller: violence and the history of inequality from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400884605Google Scholar
Schulting, R.J. 1995. Mortuary variability and status differentiation on the Columbia-Fraser Plateau. Burnaby: Archaeology Press, Simon Fraser University.Google Scholar
Stone, E.M. 2018. The trajectory of social inequality in ancient Mesopotamia, in Kohler, T.A. & Smith, M.E. (ed.) Ten thousand years of inequality: the archaeology of wealth differences: 230–61. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20d8801.12Google Scholar
Trigger, B.G. 2003. Understanding early civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840630Google Scholar
Willführ, K.P. & Störmer, C.. 2015. Social strata differentials in reproductive behavior among agricultural families in the Krummhörn region (East Frisia, 1720–1874). Historical Life Course Studies 2: 58–85.Google Scholar
Windler, A., Thiele, R. & Müller, J.. 2013. Increasing inequality in Chalcolithic South-east Europe: the case of Durankulak. Journal of Archaeological Science 40: 204–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2012.08.017Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Fochesato et al. supplementary material

Fochesato et al. supplementary material 1

Download Fochesato et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 357.8 KB
Supplementary material: File

Fochesato et al. supplementary material

Fochesato et al. supplementary material 2

Download Fochesato et al. supplementary material(File)
File 29.6 KB