Exploring Long-Term Trends in Wealth Inequality in Ancient Southwest Asia

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.

Investigating how different forms of inequality arose and were sustained is key to understanding the emergence of complex social systems, and archaeology has much to contribute to this discussion. In this paper we investigate inequality in ancient Southwest Asia using a variety of proxies for wealth including household size, storage capacity, and burial goods. Our results suggest that inequality increased from the emergence of farming to the rise of large territorial empires, and we link this to changing forms of social and political organization. We see a step change in levels of inequality around the time of the emergence of the first urban sites at the beginning of the Bronze Age. However, urban and rural sites were similarly unequal, suggesting that outside the elite the inhabitants of each encompassed a similar range of wealth levels. The situation changes during the Iron Age, when inequality in urban environments increases and rural sites become more equal, but less wealthy. This transformation coincides with a shift in landscape investment and organization, including large-scale irrigation projects and settlement dispersal, which likely increased agricultural productivity. Our results allow us to comment on the relationships between different forms of social organization and inequality over time.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35614.0