Five Thousand Years of Inequality in the Carpathian Basin

Abstract

The emergence of sedentary farming economies, especially in contexts intensified by plow agriculture, has been argued to underpin marked increases in economic inequality and its intergenerational transmission across Eurasia. To assess this presumed causal relationship, we examine relational (burials) and material (house sizes) inequalities in the Carpathian Basin, a large region in central Europe, from the time the first farmers arrived in southeastern Europe through the next five millennia to the Bronze Age. We find that although farming did increase the potentials for both relational and material inequalities that potential was rarely reached, and then only for short durations. A series of leveling mechanisms, which shifted over time, are identified including the removal of material wealth from circulation, community fission, and investments of surplus labor in infrastructural investments. In the Carpathian Basin, only after at least five thousand years were the intergenerational potentials of material wealth transmissions more broadly realized.