Farming, Inequality, and Urbanization:

Inequality on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America measured by house-floor area and storage capacity

“…While they structured their data by period and settlement type, using two methods for identifying living space, their results consistently showed that storage space generated higher Gini coefficients. Bogaard et al (2018) found the same pattern among nine Neolithic to Iron Age sites in northern Mesopotamia and southern Germany. Kohler and Higgins (2016) suggest that living space measures wealth (including labour), while storage space measures expected income in the form of farming yields.…”

“…Kohler and Higgins (2016) suggest that living space measures wealth (including labour), while storage space measures expected income in the form of farming yields. Bogaard et al (2018) follow this suggestion, and more recent studies (e.g. Bogaard et al 2019;Fochesato et al 2019) further elaborate how the Gini coefficient offers a robust method for evaluating inequality.…”

“…Combined, this evidence points to a significant relationship between wealth (as measured by floor area) and storage capacity in the archaeological study of the origins and development of social and economic inequality. Kohler and Higgins (2016) and Bogaard et al (2018) consider storage capacity as a proxy measure for anticipated income. Here then, it can be viewed as reflecting surplus, and taken to mean that variation in the Gini coefficient reflects both the surplus and surplus-deploying strategies.…”

“…Such research increasingly uses large archaeological datasets for temporally and spatially broad comparative studies of social inequality (e.g. Fochesato & Bowles 2017;Kohler & Smith 2018). These studies consider wealth to take three forms: embodied, relational and material (Bowles et al 2010).…”

Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica

“…Using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions, we show that wealth disparities generally increase with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, but that unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, become evident after the end of the Neolithic. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia are attributable initially to the greater availability of large domesticable mammals, since they allow for more profitable agricultural extensification9, and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities to sizes not possible in North and Mesoamerica prior to the arrival of Europeans10,11. We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate enlarging this sample to include societies in S. America, Africa, S. Asia, and Oceania that are under-sampled or not included in this study.…”