To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists can provide long-term perspectives and foundational background on pressing global problems and generate analyses using frameworks that unify the past and the present. Here we consider how past (and current) societies experience and respond to wealth differences, and the consequences of those choices. The GINI Project, sponsored by the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, managed through the Center for Collaborative Synthesis, and funded by NSF, is a coalition of researchers investigating the dynamics of wealth inequality in a rigorous and repeatable way, making comparisons across regions and through time to isolate factors associated with variable levels of wealth difference. Our chief measures of wealth inequality are Gini coefficients calculated across sizes of contemporaneous houses from a dozen world regions. Coalition members will present new findings based on their regional expertise, describing trends in household wealth inequality, and exploring the relationships between wealth inequality, political power, violence, structures of governance, and other factors. We also address methodological issues associated with the Gini index to characterize its performance in ethnohistorically known and contemporaneous western societies. We will demonstrate the power and productivity of a new model for archaeological collaboration that can contribute to addressing fundamental questions about wealth distribution in human societies.

Other Keywords
Social and Political Organization • inequality • Digital Archaeology: GIS • Neolithic • Bronze Age • Maya: Classic • Power Relations and Inequality • Political economy • Survey • Economics

Geographic Keywords
United Mexican States (Country) • Belize (Country) • North America (Continent) • Republic of Panama (Country) • Asia (Continent) • Peten (State / Territory) • Republic of El Salvador (Country) • Cayman Islands (Country) • Yucatan (State / Territory) • Republic of Guatemala (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)

  • Documents (11)
Documents
  • Approaching (In)Equality in the Indus Civilization: A Preliminary Analysis of House Size at Mohenjo-daro (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Green. Iqtedar Alam. Claudette Lopez. Cameron Petrie.

    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. The archaeology of South Asia challenges theories about the deep history of inequality, but data from its first cities are rarely included in comparative studies. This paper addresses this problem by presenting a preliminary analysis of spatial data produced by the early twentieth-century...

  • Capitalizing on GINI (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Roscoe.

    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. The CfAS’s Inequality Project focuses on economic inequality, a feature of modern society that has attracted both increasing public concern and growing historical and social research because of its critical implications for individual, national, and global well-being. The Inequality...

  • Exploring Long-Term Trends in Wealth Inequality in Ancient Southwest Asia (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Lawrence. Valentina Tumolo. Pertev Basri.

    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...

  • GINI and the Indigenous Critique: Dynamics of Equality and Inequality in Eastern North America (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Steere. Jennifer Birch. Claire Auerbach. Marcie Demyan. Alina Karapandzich.

    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...

  • A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach for Estimating Gini Coefficients from House Floor Area: A Case Study from Prehistoric Japan (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrico Crema. Charles Simmons.

    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...

  • Inequality in the Maya Lowlands (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson. Gary Feinman.

    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. Assessing inequality using the Gini coefficient based on house size provides a standard metric for studying dynamic societal change across vast spatiotemporal contexts. Within a single geographic region, such as the Maya Lowlands, wealth inequities change over time as political systems...

  • Settlement Density, Household Inequality, and Social Interaction in the Western Maya Lowlands (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson. Andrés Mejía Ramón. Lorena Paiz. Jill Onken. Jonathan Scholnick.

    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. Decades of settlement pattern research in the Maya lowlands has produced unparalleled datasets for studying processes of urbanization in tropical landscapes. Recent comparative studies support a view of ancient Maya cities as low-density urban systems, which may have created different...

  • Social Inequality and Polity Organization in Prehispanic Southern Andean Populations (Argentina and Bolivia, 500 BCE–1500 CE) (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Pablo Cruz. Valeria Franco. Jordi López Lillo. Julián Salazar.

    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 communication we will focus on inequality and the forms of social organization in those Andean societies that developed in northwestern Argentina and southern Bolivia during the Formative (500 BCE–600 CE), Regional Development (1200–1450 CE) and Late (1450–1550 CE) periods. Our...

  • Summary of Results to Date in Light of Existing Models for the Development of Wealth Inequality (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Kohler. Amy Bogaard.

    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 summarize key results from the previous papers in this symposium, all of which report preliminary findings of the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project. As Lauren Bacall sings in “To Have and Have Not”: how little we know! Archaeologists have assembled the...

  • Wealth Inequality in Polynesia: A Comparison of Evidence from the Hawaiian Islands, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and Aotearoa (New Zealand) from AD 1000–1800 (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy.

    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. Polynesia has been largely overlooked in previous archaeological assessments of levels of wealth difference despite the pivotal role that research in the region has played in advancing our understanding of inequality in human societies. The Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI)...

  • Wet-Preserved Living Spaces : Measuring Social Inequality from Circum-alpine and Central European Pile and Bog Dwellings (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Kerig.

    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. Neolithic and Bronze Age wet preserved settlements are among the most fascinating sites of European prehistory. The circum-alpine sites (“pile-dwellings”) in particular attracted attention early on: because of their excellent preservation, they promised an immediate interpretative access...