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

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.