inequality (Other Keyword)
1-25 (44 Records)
In this talk we use case studies to compare the agroecology of relatively egalitarian Neolithic communities (low ginis) with that of early urban societies featuring high levels of inequality (high ginis). We use a combination of novel archaeobotanical and -zoological approaches to investigate arable land management. Neolithic sequences in western Asia, the Aegean and central Europe present contrasting settings in which early farmers developed labour-intensive cropping strategies that buffered...
Archaeology and the Production of Capital in the 21st Century (2016)
Over the last two decades, archaeologists have increasingly debated whether and how archaeology can be used to promote public welfare and foster progressive social change. Some scholars have emphasized the methodological importance of praxis. Others have emphasized the pragmatic need for public intellectuals. And, still others have emphasized the ethical necessity of community engagement. In this paper, I maintain that archaeology can and should be an ally in the effort to understand, and...
Boom-and-Bust Population Dynamics: Climate Change, Resource Inequality, and Intergroup Conflict in the Prehistoric North American Southwest (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the transition to agricultural economies human populations underwent profound changes including, in many regions, rapid growth accompanied by marked volatility. The Colorado Plateau in western North America offers unique insights into volatile population dynamics, as it represents one of the few...
Classic Maya Household Inequality in Southern Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Inequality is present in all forms of human societies, but the degree of inequality within a single city or region varies. Recently in archaeological contexts, inequality has been quantitatively evaluated based on house size using the Gini coefficient and Lorenz Curve, thus enabling the comparison of wealth measures and inequality between ancient cities of...
Co-constitutive Peripheries: Settlement Landscapes of Power and Memory on Mauritius (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines changes in settlement patterns in Mauritius over the seventeenth through twentieth centuries and the ways these landscapes are remembered on the island today. I emphasize agro-industrial landscapes as a specific cultural mode of land use and as a spatial phenomenon that has come to define so much of the...
The "Colored Dead": African American Burying Grounds in a Confederate Stronghold (2018)
Some call Lexington, Virginia the place "where the South went to die": Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are buried there, along with countless Confederate soldiers. The extent to which the South truly expired is controversial, given for example the continuing, frequent presence of enthusiasts with gray uniforms and battle flags. How, in this context, have African Americans been memorialized? This paper considers marked and unmarked antebellum burials, Reconstruction-era graves, and...
Comparative Social Inequality and Class Structure in Ancient Cities (2015)
Using the Gini index and associated Lorenz curve, ancient cities dispersed throughout several cultural areas and representing varied temporal periods will be compared by a representative measurement of wealth. Using residential house size in several sites where the complete extent of the residences are mapped, calculated area and volume will be used as the standard for comparison. The volume of each structure is a more representative measurement of wealth because it encompasses the cost of labor...
Complex but Equal: Developing an Archaeological Inequality Index to Investigate Social Inequality at the Bronze Age III site of Numayra, Jordan (2016)
The origins, evolution, and variation of inequality comprise a central overarching theme within anthropological archaeology. Various ideas, including hierarchy and heterarchy and their material correlates, have been proffered to explain the origins and impact of inequality on past social, economic, and political organization. Within Economics and Development Studies, various indices and measures, e.g., Gini coefficient, Theil Index, HDI and GDP, and the Consumption Approach have been offered as...
Cooperation, Labor, Sharing, and Inequality in a Long-Lived Household, Bridge River Site, British Columbia (2016)
Archaeological research at the Bridge River site, British Columbia, demonstrates that during the Bridge River 3 period (ca. 1300-1000 cal. B.P.) material wealth-based inequality developed on an inter-household basis during what appears to have been a Malthusian ceiling where populations were briefly very high and resource access weakened. While there is significant knowledge of village-wide socio-economic, demographic and political change at the site little work has been done to gain an...
The Development of Inequality in Middle Horizon Cusco: Entheogens and Ritual Ceremonies to the Rescue (2016)
The Andean and Amazonian regions are home to numerous plants that can be prepared to induce altered states of consciousness. During the pre-Inka period in the Cusco area, evidence from the village of Ak'awillay indicates the consumption of alcohol, coca, and hallucinogens in public ceremonies. Some of the rituals involving entheogens could have corresponded to healing sessions, but the paraphernalia uncovered at the site suggests that most hallucinogens were consumed to communicate with the...
Dimensions, Links, and Scales in the Behavioral Ecology of Inequality (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) initially focused on individual actors optimizing in a single decision category over very short time scales—“Robinson Crusoe rustles up lunch.” Current and future progress in HBE entails several intertwined developments, of which we address three: (a) attending to social dimensions, by drawing on evolutionary social...
Early expressions of persistent leadership and inequality in the Andean Preceramic (2016)
Research over the past few decades in the Andean world has identified a number of preludes to sociopolitical complexity, persistent leadership, and emergent inequality that involve a diversity of social and cultural forms, including the control and manipulation of ritual or religious power, the mobilization of labor to construct a variety of forms of public architecture, the display of status or prestige items, and control over access to socially valued goods. In many archaeological contexts...
The Economics of Aztec Inequality or, the Inequality of the Aztec Economy (2015)
In discussions of Aztec society, the economy and inequality are typically treated as separate realms. The former is discussed in terms of production, exchange, and consumption, while the latter is framed around nobles versus commoners and various hierarchies. Although no one would claim that these two topics are unrelated, the full extent of their interconnection is rarely acknowledged. We cannot understand Aztec economic processes and institutions without reference to patterns of inequality,...
Everyone Was Black in the Mines: Exploring the Reasons for Relaxed Racial Tensions in Early West Virginia Coal Company Towns. (2015)
While racial inequality was frequently the norm in many early 20th century communities, several historians have noted that many central Appalachian coal mining ‘company towns’ tended toward more equitable white/black race relations. The progressive nature of these histories is opposed to our modern stereotypes of the region, and may provide and important outlet for positive narratives of Appalachia. This paper draws largely on oral histories and documentary evidence to understand the processes...
Excavation of a Rural Middle Preclassic Maya Village: Investigations at Paso del Macho, Yucatán, México (2017)
Paso del Macho is a Middle Preclassic village settlement located in the eastern Puuc region of the Yucatán Peninsula. Excavations of mounded architecture, the main plaza, and ballcourt of the site have established a chronological range beginning in the early Middle Preclassic and ending by the Late Preclassic. The earliest architecture at the settlement includes at least three small raised platforms associated with Ek ceramics, the earliest pottery complex in Northern Yucatán. Following this,...
Exploring Long-Term Trends in Wealth Inequality in Ancient Southwest Asia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigating how different forms of inequality arose and were sustained is key to understanding the emergence of complex social systems, and archaeology has much to contribute to this discussion. In this paper we investigate inequality in ancient Southwest Asia using a variety of proxies...
Gendered Cooperation and Competition: A Multivariate Statistical Analysis of Floor Activity Patterns in Housepit 54 (2017)
Housepit 54 at the Bridge River site, British Columbia provides a unique look at the evolution of interpersonal dynamics within a single household over time. The sequence of 17 floors evinces a wide-range of activity patterns and spatial configurations reflecting performed labor. Current theories of intra-household dynamics posit that cooperative, complimentary work should underlie individual social interactions within a single household. However from late Bridge River 2 (ca. 1300-1500 cal BP)...
The Gilded Age in Eastern Yucatán, Mexico: the Age of Betrayal or the Rise of the Middle Class? (2015)
The social transformations produced by rapid industrialization and expansion of henequen production in the late nineteenth century in western Yucatan were not what happened in Maya-speaking communities further to the east. The Gilded Age in eastern Yucatan was attenuated because communities suffered the protracted aftershocks of the Caste War of Yucatan (1847-1901), which may have repressed wealth disparities instead of heightening them. In this paper, I examine the archaeology of haciendas and...
GINI and the Indigenous Critique: Dynamics of Equality and Inequality in Eastern North America (2023)
This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we utilize the systemic, empirically driven methodology developed by the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) project in order to evaluate and compare differences in wealth accumulation for Indigenous eastern North American societies. These societies were predominantly...
Gini Coefficients and the Measurement of Inequality: An Introduction (2016)
We briefly explore the history and current use of Gini coefficients, emphasizing the relatively few studies previously completed in archaeology. Then we explore the behavior of this measure against a variety of theoretical distributions, showing that it makes a useful though imperfect statistical summary of interesting phenomena. Finally we present Gini coefficients for a variety of contexts drawn from prehispanic Pueblo societies. Archaeological thought on emerging inequality has tended to...
Have you had rice today? The costs of consumption in Early Modern South India (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Rice and other water and labor-intensive foods form the core of elite South Indian cuisines, the food of both gods and high-status individuals. Rice is synonymous with food in several South Indian languages and yet rice-based cuisines were (and are) not universally available. In the semi-arid interior, the costs...
Heritage That Gives Back: Community Development and Heritage Preservation in Tihosuco, Mexico (2016)
The Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo is a community based anthropological program that seeks to combat the visible economic and social inequality in the region. Such inequalities exist both between the tourists and laborers as well as between the larger economic centers and peripheral indigenous communities. While the project seeks to bridge some gaps by creating jobs and a small-scale tourism market, we also explore ways to have an impact upon...
A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach for Estimating Gini Coefficients from House Floor Area: A Case Study from Prehistoric Japan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Robust quantitative measures of wealth inequality are pivotal for investigating long-term social and economic changes from a comparative perspective. Notwithstanding criticisms on its reliability as a proxy of wealth inequality, the application of Gini coefficients on house size data has...
Household Activities, Status, and Social Organization at Uxul, Campeche, Mexico (2015)
The physical remains of ancient buildings and activity areas provide an important archaeological window into the lives and practices of past households. In the Maya region, patio groups composed of multiple structures housing extended families have long been recognized as the fundamental units of settlement. At a very basic level, patio groups were both the primary locus and one of the most tangible material outcomes of household activities. Variations in their size and spatial configuration can...
Housing and Society at Teotihuacan (2016)
Housing at Teotihuacan took several forms, including apartment compounds, nonroyal palaces, residential quarters within civic structures, and perishable houses. I describe several approaches and methods that have been, or could be, applied to the analysis Teotihuacan housing. These include quantitative measures of wealth inequality using the Gini index; typological analysis of the forms of rooms, spaces, and compounds; measures of architectural standardization; distributions of surface artifacts...