Centralized Urban Planning and Economic Segregation: A Case Study Based on Wealth Inequality at Tell Asmar and Khafajah in Mesopotamia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores a possible correlation between central planning and economic segregation in ancient urbanized cities. A pre-planned and constructed urban residential area may have fostered an aggregate of inhabitants who had similar traits, such as ethnicity, class, wealth, occupation and religion. Different clusters of people may be discerned between districts, neighborhoods, or particular sections within a neighborhood at the intra-site level. It is postulated that a top-down process designs a living quarter as a local defensive measure to an external military threat, which results in bringing together residents with similar economic traits. A case study to examine this correlation is drawn from the third millennium B.C. cities of Tell Asmar and Khafajah in central Mesopotamia. Excavations exposed dozens of houses within residential neighborhoods, and one of the occupation areas at Khafajah shows a well-planned project that took place around 2400–2300 B.C. Through the use of the Lorenz curve and Gini index, the houses built by the centralized project exhibit a higher degree of economic similarity than those of other house levels at these sites. This correlation should be further tested with larger data from other ancient cities across the globe.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38000.0