Wealth Inequality in the Late Classic Valley of Oaxaca: A Domestic Perspective

Summary

The Late Classic period in the Valley of Oaxaca is marked by shared practices in residential organization, design, the layout of houses, and domestic artifact assemblages both within and between sites throughout the region. This degree of homogeneity allows for cross-site comparison of excavated residences to examine household wealth inequality on a systemic and regional scale. In this paper, we employ different indices to explore multiple lines of evidence (e.g., patio size and other architectural measures as well as access to portable goods) to quantitatively measure wealth disparity among 15 Late Classic residences spanning five sites in the Valley of Oaxaca. Individual axes of inequality are not entirely consistent, thereby illustrating that wealth may be constituted differently in distinct contexts. Despite challenges of sampling, the overall pattern reveals that the extent of wealth disparity among households (large and small, elaborate and basic) is less extensive than might be expected for an urban society or is found in other contemporaneous Mesoamerican cases.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Inequality from the Bottom Up: Measuring and Explaining Household Inequality in Antiquity

Keywords

Spatial Coverage