Identifying the Archaeological Signatures of Inequality: An Analysis of Inequality at Late Formative La Joya and Bezuapan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster presents an analysis of artifact assemblage data from La Joya and Bezuapan, two late Formative Period (ca. 400 BC-AD 100) sites in southern Veracruz, Mexico. The study focuses on the ways in which wealth inequality is manifested in the archaeological record; wealth is defined here as the total of desirable factors consisting of two main categories that provide value, relational, and material forms. An analysis of systematic coring data in addition to information derived from in-field excavations provides insight into wealth inequality across households at the two sites.

These data are interpreted using an economic measure known as the Gini index. The Gini index assesses the cumulative distribution of percentile values in reference to an assumed constant. This measure is increasingly applied to archaeological sites, and this poster seeks to provide another useful and comparable archaeology example of the Gini index’s utility. This analysis will also provide additional information relevant to the study of Formative Period societies along the Mexican Gulf lowlands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32945