Gini Coefficients and the Measurement of Inequality: An Introduction

Summary

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 emphasize phenomena at just one end of the population distribution. Gini coefficients and similar distribution-based measures usefully bring “population thinking” into the discussion.

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

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Spatial Coverage