Approaching (In)Equality in the Indus Civilization: A Preliminary Analysis of House Size at Mohenjo-daro

Summary

This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology of South Asia challenges theories about the deep history of inequality, but data from its first cities are rarely included in comparative studies. This paper addresses this problem by presenting a preliminary analysis of spatial data produced by the early twentieth-century excavations at Mohenjo-daro. Mohenjo-daro was one of the cities of the Indus civilization (~2600–1900 BC). It had large nonresidential buildings, elements of civic planning, sophisticated craft technologies, and a complex agropastoral economy with long-distance connections to contemporary societies, but qualitative evidence for a ruling class is lacking. To understand whether this conspicuous absence of “elites” manifests in other categories of material culture, we digitized first-edition excavation reports produced by the major excavations at the site in the 1920s and 1930s, and vectorized architectural plans using a combination of highly precise GIS-based methods. Drawing on spatial syntax theory, we have retheorized the Indus house by testing methods designed to more clearly differentiate public and private spaces. These data were used to prepare Gini coefficients, shedding light on quantitative wealth differences at Mohenjo-daro, making it possible to compare the cities and settlements of the Indus Civilization to other early societies as part of the Gini Project.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35724.0