The agroecology of inequality: Novel bioarchaeological approaches to early urbanization in western Asia and Europe

Summary

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 households from risk but also fostered potential inequalities. Alongside ‘high-input’ crops demanding supplementary watering and/or manuring, it is increasingly clear that such regimes also included relatively stress-tolerant crops. The latter were crucial for the staggered emergence of stratified urban societies dependent on extensive, land-limited systems. We present new archaeobotanical evidence to show that an expanding scale of production (‘extensification’) – not intensification per se – can be discerned in disparate regions and may be a widespread feature of pronounced, long-term social inequality in grain-based urban societies.

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