Issues of social and economic inequality are increasingly becoming areas of study for archaeologists; however, little work has been done on the uniform application of analytical methods. Here we assess the use of the Gini index for determining wealth inequality in eight Prehispanic central Mexican contexts. We analyze house size at the Late Postclassic sites of Capilco (village), Cuexcomate (town), and Yautepec (city), all in the state of Morelos. Agricultural field sizes for two communities described in a Nahuatl-language census immediately after the Spanish conquest are also analyzed. Our final context is the Xolalpan phase apartment compounds at Teotihuacan. Using these case studies we discuss methodological issues concerning the use of Gini indices to infer social inequality with archaeological data. We find that the Gini index, when applied following the proposed methodological standards, serves as a useful tool for the quantification of inequality across multiple archaeological case studies.
All cities, from the distant past to the present, provide services for their residents, but the nature and level of urban services vary widely, as do the providers. How are we to understand this variation? We examine the major theoretical and conceptual approaches to urban services, and find that none is sufficiently comprehensive to explain patterns of service provision in all types of cities: public choice theory, co-production, critical theory, urban political ecology, collective action theory, and social integration. We use two premodern cities – Zanzibar and Tikal – to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of these theories. A major challenge is to account for both central administrative control of services and more generative, bottom-up service provision.
We describe methods of coding and analyzing historical and archaeological data for comparative analysis of premodern cities. As part of a larger study of spatial access to urban services, we identify eight relevant contextual domains and define variables for each domain. Information from publications on each city is assembled, and the data are coded independently by three scholars and checked for agreement. To date, we have completed contextual coding for 15 cities. Here, we focus on methods to analyze relationships among variables within contextual domains using two example domains—Class Mobility and Governance. Key methodological points involve the problem of missing data, multiple tests with an appropriate correction, and the importance of variation among cases for effective analysis of a domain. Our interpretation of preliminary findings highlights a degree of independence between two different arenas of social life that may relate to collective action. Documentation of our procedures contributes to a growing body of systematic, comparative, cross-cultural analyses of mid-size samples. This study is distinctive in its focus on cities rather than cultures, societies, or polities.
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