Understanding and calculating household size, wealth, and inequality in the Maya Lowlands

Survey teams at the El Pilar Archaeological Reserve for Maya Flora and Fauna have mapped 70 percent of its 20 km2 area and revealed the extent of settlement around the city center. Large-scale civic architecture, and the distribution of smaller ceremonial groups and minor centers, reflect the wealth and power of Maya rulers presiding over the largest Classic period city in the upper Belize River area. Previous analyses suggest disparities in wealth at El Pilar were more nuanced than the elite/commoner dichotomy commonly invoked for Classic Maya society. This article works to understand wealth inequality at ancient El Pilar by computing Gini coefficients from areal and volumetric calculations of primary residential units—the class of settlement remains most likely to represent ancient households. Presentation of Gini coefficients and their potential interpretations follows a discussion of settlement classification and residential group labor investment. We conclude by contextualizing these results within prior settlement pattern analyses to explore how disparities in wealth may have been distributed across the physical and social landscape.

Section: Gini Coefficient Resultsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative analyses of wealth inequality at Classic period El Pilar: The Gini index and labor investment

Horn,

Tran,

Ford

2023

“…Structure and plazuela areas were obtained through the Calculate Geometry function, while volume calculations were run using a custom Python script provided by Chase and colleagues (2023), building on existing methodologies (Chase 2017;Ebert et al 2016;Šprajc et al 2022;Stanton et al 2020). Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients (raw and corrected) were computed for each of the three units of analysis in Excel and R, based on Shryock and Siegel (1976), and a bootstrapping procedure was used to find the 95 percent confidence interval for the generated data (see Chase et al, 2023).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beneath the surface, below the line: Exploring household differentiation at Las Cuevas using Gini coefficients

Montgomery,

Moyes

2023

During the Late Classic period (a.d. 550–900), ancient Maya settlement spread throughout western Belize, including the Vaca Plateau, a rugged karstic region with high densities of ritually utilized cave systems. Within the past decade, archaeologists have increasingly drawn on LiDAR technology to document the extent of such settlement at local and regional scales. Combined with traditional pedestrian survey, we have begun to amass substantial data on variation within household groups, disparities which may indicate inequality within these communities. Here, we use settlement data generated from the Las Cuevas region to quantify residential variation through Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves. Special attention is given to areal and volumetric deviation of identified households within three samples: (1) the complete 95.25 km2 study area; (2) a 12.25 km2 zone of higher population between the primary centers of Las Cuevas and Monkey Tail; and (3) households situated within 500 m of ritually utilized caves within the study area. Results indicate some degree of variation within household area and volume for all samples, suggestive of unequal access to labor within the region. This research adds to the growing database of Gini-based analyses to improve our understanding of wealth differentials within pre-modern populations throughout the Lowlands.

“…Adapting methods to local contexts: Taphonomy, settlement preservation, and house size Gini coefficients are typically used to assess wealth concentration within a population (Chase et al 2023; see also Peterson and Drennan 2018). Gini coefficients range between 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (maximal inequality).…”

Section: The Belize River Valleymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Gini coefficient is commonly used to measure wealth inequality, although it is, in reality, a measure of the unevenness of a batch of the input variable the coefficient is based on (not dissimilar to diversity indices; see Peterson and Drennan 2018). Based on this unevenness, a higher Gini coefficient is usually associated with greater degrees of wealth inequality (see Chase et al 2023), but this study uses the Gini coefficient to characterize residential differentiation at Baking Pot and Lower Dover, discussing the implications of these Gini coefficients in relation to political models of labor organization (Abrams 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of residential differentiation and labor control at Baking Pot and Lower Dover in the Belize River Valley

Walden,

Hoggarth,

Ebert

et al. 2023

The Classic Maya polities of Baking Pot and Lower Dover developed along two dramatically different trajectories. At Baking Pot, the capital and associated apical elite regime grew concomitantly with surrounding populations over a thousand-year period. The smaller polity of Lower Dover, in contrast, formed when a Late Classic political center was established by an emergent apical elite regime amidst several long-established intermediate elite-headed districts. The different trajectories through which these polities formed should have clear implications for residential size variability. We employ the Gini coefficient to measure variability in household volume to compare patterns of residential size differentiation between the two polities. The Gini coefficients, while similar, suggest greater differentiation in residential size at Baking Pot than at Lower Dover, likely related to the centralized control of labor by the ruling elite at Baking Pot. While the Gini coefficient is synonymous with measuring wealth inequalities, we suggest that in the Classic period Belize River Valley, residential size was more reflective of labor control.