Wet-Preserved Living Spaces : Measuring Social Inequality from Circum-alpine and Central European Pile and Bog Dwellings

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.

Neolithic and Bronze Age wet preserved settlements are among the most fascinating sites of European prehistory. The circum-alpine sites (“pile-dwellings”) in particular attracted attention early on: because of their excellent preservation, they promised an immediate interpretative access to the past. What it had been like appeared immediately visible. Today, dendrochronological dating and the digitization and surveying of a reliable sample of floor plans enables a comparison of the differences in size of the individual buildings as well as between settlements. Here, the measurement of Gini coefficients is appropriate as a measure of inequality. In the paper, the correlations of Gini measurements with settlement duration will be especially examined. If the buildings’ additions and alterations have been made according to the life stages of the occupants—for example, houses may have grown with the number of their occupants—then higher Ginis should be correlated with longer occupancy duration. However, a maximum Gini, which represents a maximum inequality, would also be expected. The work is part of the GINI project and received also funding by the DFG under Germany’s excellence strategy EXC2150-390870439.

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35770.0