9 Social Inequality and Access to Services in Premodern Cities

Abstract

We use spatial analytical methods to illuminate one aspect of the urban experience: equity of access to facilities that provide material, religious, and assembly services. We compare three cities known from archaeology (Teotihuacan, Tikal, and Empuries) and three historical cities (Bhaktapur, Chester, and Lamu). Some neighborhoods had better access to service facilities than others, pointing to ancient patterns of spatial inequality. Data on house size suggest that status also impacted service access. Greater travel time to service facilities negatively impacts the well-being of urban residents in two ways: it reduces access to key services, and it takes time away from other activities. Our methods for identifying these spatial patterns of inequality open a new window on the implications of social inequality for the premodern urban experience. [Urban services, social inequality, spatial analysis, human experience]A rchaeologists and others have long argued that the Urban Revolution-the development of the earliest states and cities-was one of the most far-reaching transformations in the history of human society. New institutions and practices-kingship, social stratification, organized religion, formal property relations, large cities, and many others-arose in several parts of the world (Adams 1966; Smith 2009; Trigger 2003). Perhaps less appreciated, however, are the fundamental transformations of the human experience that accompanied the Urban Revolution. Political subordination, poverty, reduced personal freedom, crowding, and lowered life expectancy did not originate overnight with the earliest states and cities; all had precedents in earlier societies (Flannery and Marcus 2012). But these experiences were greatly intensified after the Urban Revolution. The empirical documentation of such transformations is a crucial task for archaeology, one that is necessary if we are to understand how life was lived in the past, and how past human experiences compare to life today.In this chapter we address this task by focusing on a social domain-urban inequality-with particular relevance for comparing human experiences in the past and the present. The earliest cities were places of inequality where poorer residents shared the streets with wealthy, powerful elites. What did this juxtaposition of social classes mean for urban life in the past? How can archaeologists study the issue? We argue that by focusing on three universals of urban life and organization-elites, neighborhoods, and urban servicesarchaeologists and historians can generate reliable data on urban inequality in the past. This approach allows us to contribute to all four components of the Archaeology of the Human Experience (AHE). Specifically, we (1) investigate

The Governance and Leadership of Prehispanic Mesoamerican Polities: New Perspectives and Comparative Implications

“…Monte Albán, also collectively organized, was interlinked through a web of roads (Blanton 1978), as were other Classic period Valley of Oaxaca centers, such as El Palmillo (Feinman and Nicholas 2004). Site plans and the deployment of accessways provide starting points for the assessment of the distribution of public good in Mesoamerican cities, but more quantitative analyses also are underway (e.g., Dennehy et al 2016;Smith et al 2016b;Stanley et al 2016). Such efforts, although offering a constructive path forward, involve a complex web of assumptions and have to date not employed a means of measuring/assessing access to certain services and goods on a per capita basis.…”

Re-visioning Classic Maya Polities

“…15 To examine these issues, the arguments must be extended beyond ideological spheres and to matters economic. To account for both the self-aggrandizing nature of Maya lords compared to most pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican rulers, and how they were unable or unwilling to offer subaltern householders much in the way of public goods (e.g., wide thoroughfares, broad open plazas), 16 we might look toward the ways in which lordly power was funded. 17 Prior generations of scholars, hinged by the appropriation of Marx and Wittfogel to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, 18 presumed that Maya lords fostered their positions through primordial legacies of local land ownership or direct control of the economy; but neither idea yet has ample empirical grounding.…”

Wealth Inequality in the Ancient Near East: A Preliminary Assessment Using Gini Coefficients and Household Size

“…Study of ancient purchase contracts within the Near East has shown that the cost of housing varied depending on its placement inside the city (Veenhof 1996, 257–60). Archaeologists have attempted to address this issue by comparing neighbourhood and household access to services, such as markets or religious buildings (Dennehy et al 2016), and these could be usefully combined with our inequality work. A more significant issue is that the use of household buildings as a proxy may remove particular classes of society from the equation altogether.…”