Is wealth inequality a universal feature of human societies, or did
early peoples live an egalitarian existence? How did inequality develop
before the modern era? Did inequalities in wealth increase as people
settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding? Why in
general do such disparities increase, and how recent are the high levels
of wealth inequality now experienced in many developed nations? How can
archaeologists tell?
Ten Thousand Years of Inequality addresses these and other questions
by presenting the first set of consistent quantitative measurements of
ancient wealth inequality. The authors are archaeologists who have
adapted the Gini index, a statistical measure of wealth distribution
often used by economists to measure contemporary inequality, and applied
it to house-size distributions over time and around the world. Clear
descriptions of methods and assumptions serve as a model for other
archaeologists and historians who want to document past patterns of
wealth disparity.
The chapters cover a variety of ancient cases, including early
hunter-gatherers, farmer villages, and agrarian states and empires. The
final chapter synthesizes and compares the results. Among the new and
notable outcomes, the authors report a systematic difference between
higher levels of inequality in ancient Old World societies and lower
levels in their New World counterparts.
For the first time, archaeology allows humanity's deep past to provide
an account of the early manifestations of wealth inequality around the
world.
Contributors
Nicholas Ames
Alleen Betzenhauser
Amy Bogaard
Samuel Bowles
Meredith S. Chesson
Abhijit Dandekar
Timothy J. Dennehy
Robert D. Drennan
Laura J. Ellyson
Deniz Enverova
Ronald K. Faulseit
Gary M. Feinman
Mattia Fochesato
Thomas A. Foor
Vishwas D. Gogte
Timothy A. Kohler
Ian Kuijt
Chapurukha M. Kusimba
Mary-Margaret Murphy
Linda M. Nicholas
Rahul C. Oka
Matthew Pailes
Christian E. Peterson
Anna Marie Prentiss
Michael E. Smith
Elizabeth C. Stone
Amy Styring
Jade Whitlam
