Quantifying Inequality among Ancestral Pueblo Households

Summary

Recent studies of household inequality in the central Mesa Verde region (CMV) and Chaco Canyon indicate that the degree of wealth inequality among ancestral Pueblo households remained relatively low in the CMV even as it increased dramatically in Chaco from the mid-800s through the early 1000s, based on Gini coefficients calculated on household floor area as a proxy for wealth. Beginning in the late A.D. 1000s, however, Gini coefficients increased among CMV households as well, reaching values as high as those for Chaco Canyon, and above the median for a recently compiled worldwide sample of prehistoric agriculturalists. Here we expand this analysis by calculating Gini coefficients through time for households in the middle San Juan and add some comparative ethnographic data from the Hopi pueblo of Orayvi (late 19th/early 20th century).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21891