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Archaeology supports proposed redefinition of egalitarianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2026
Abstract
Influenced by reports from eastern North America, early Enlightenment thinkers portrayed hunter-gatherers as largely egalitarian. Subsequent observations, anthropological research, and archaeological evidence since the 1970s documented notable inequalities of power, wealth, and rank in some hunter-gatherer societies. Recent global archaeological analyses link increasing inequality to population growth, fuelling increases in group size, growing constraints on land and resources, and thus on individual autonomy.
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References
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Many (especially early) Enlightenment thinkers considered hunting-and-gathering societies to be largely egalitarian. This view was informed by Jesuit accounts of Indigenous eastern North Americans (1630s–1700s), Baron de Lahontan’s description of the Huron (de la Hontan, Reference de la Hontan2022a, Reference de la Hontan2022b) published in 1703, and the comparative work of Joseph-François Lafitau, who also speculated that the general dispersal of political power, the lack of emphasis on property accumulation, and norms of sharing that constrained inequality in these societies might equally apply to earliest societies everywhere (Lafitau, Reference Lafitau2014, published 1724). Observations from the hunter-gatherer-fishers of the Northwest Coast of North America documenting large wealth differences, elite control of resources, hereditary rank, and slavery began to appear shortly after Rousseau’s 1778 death: Cook’s account of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) and other Northwest Coast groups appeared in 1784. For the last 125 years, anthropologists too have been documenting non-egalitarian hunter-gatherers. Franz Boas demonstrated that the Kwakwakaʼwakw (Kwakiutl) possessed hereditary ranks and slavery (Reference Boas1895). William C. MacLeod gathered comparative material to show that slavery was not unusual among American indigenous non-farming societies with surplus production, differential access to prestige goods, and ownership of fishing locations or resource patches (Reference MacLeod1928).
Archaeologists were somewhat slow in documenting the time-depth of non-egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but by the 1970s Arthur Saxe was drawing on variation in burial treatment to argue for status differentiation in Mesolithic Sudan (Saxe, Reference Saxe and Brown1971). Thomas King used settlement spatial organisation, settlement hierarchies, and uneven distributions of shell beads across sites and burials to argue for sociopolitical differentiation in some pre-Hispanic California groups (King, Reference King1976). Kenneth Ames proposed that it was the intensification of salmon harvesting on the Northwest Coast, the development of large storage facilities, and the control of productive resource locations that allowed elites to accumulate surplus, sponsor feasts and potlatches, and institutionalise (make hereditary) their leadership (Ames, Reference Ames1981).
Thus, the claim in the present article that “nominally egalitarian societies are often unequal across seven important interconnected domains: embodied capital, social capital, leadership, gender, age/knowledge, material capital/land tenure, and reproduction” is not likely to be surprising or controversial, particularly in light of recent progress in measuring degrees of inequality in such groups (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Hill, Marlowe, Nolin, Wiessner, Gurven, Bowles, Borgerhoff Mulder, Hertz and Bell2010). (Although it is not clear precisely which societies are included in Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden’s “nominally egalitarian” group.) The more enduring contributions of this article will be its redefinition of egalitarianism and its call for more attention to the “plural processes … by which relative equality is maintained” (my italics) since these provide equally valuable guidance for how failure, relaxation, or by-passing such processes may underwrite increasing inequality. Space limits my comment to just the first of these.
Defining egalitarianism
Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden define egalitarian societies as those where “socio-ecological circumstances enable most individuals to successfully secure their own resource access, status, and autonomy.” As an archaeologist I’m encouraged by the lack of recourse implied by this definition to changing human motivations (such as a diminished concern for equality) to explain the shift to less-equal societies evident in so many areas during the Holocene. This definition instead locates the causes for such changes in the sorts of changing socioecological circumstances that we can hope to uncover via archaeology. Distribution of resources across the landscape and group size are mentioned in the text as relevant socioecological circumstances; Their Figure 1 adds resource stochasticity, food storage, social network structure, and circumscription to the list.
Findings from recent archaeological research reconstructing global changes through time in economic growth and inequality underwrite Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden’s approach. In the GINI Project (Bogaard et al., Reference Bogaard, Ortman, Birch, Quequezana, Chirikure, Crema, Cruz, Feinman, Fochesato, Green, Gronenborn, Hamerow, Jin, Kerig, Lawrence, McCoy, Munson, Roscoe, Rosenstock, Thompson, Petrie and Kohler2024), house size is considered to be a proxy for wealth or permanent income – justified and discussed in Kohler, Bogaard, and Ortman (Reference Kohler, Bogaard and Ortman2025) and Kohler, Green, and Ortman (Reference Kohler, Green and Ortman2026). Cross-sectional Bayesian multilevel regression results from this article, most recently based on 1164 sites from 24 regions, show that on global scales and throughout some nine millennia, both growth and inequality are strongly related to increases in two non-technological variables. One, called SA (Social Advantage), characterises sites according to their position in the local site-size hierarchy (ranging from 1 to 5 in these data) and according to the number of levels in that hierarchy (range 1–6). These are added together to form SA, an ordinal measure of the minimal size of the connected network of people whose work and interactions create wealth (and inequalities therein). It is a minimal estimate because it does not take into account possible interactions with neighbouring settlement hierarchies (in different polities). Increasing values for SA are particularly strongly related to increases in wealth inequality (Kohler et al., Reference Kohler, Green and Ortman2026, Figure 2 top).
A second variable of interest here (I omit technological variables as not relevant to this article) is a measure of the extent of landesque capital development and pressure on land called Fourscale. Amy Bogaard et al. (Reference Bogaard, Birch, Cervantes Quequezana, Chirikure, Crema, Cruz, Feinman, Fochesato, Green, Jin, Kerig, Jamerow, Lawrence, McCoy, Munson, Petrie and Roscoe2025), building on theory developed in Bogaard, Fochesato, and Bowles (Reference Bogaard, Fochesato and Bowles2019), explain this measure in detail. For farmers, higher values represent systems that are increasingly land- (rather than labour-) limited. Higher values of Fourscale are especially strongly related to increases in wealth (growth or productivity) (Kohler et al., Reference Kohler, Green and Ortman2026, Figure 2 bottom) but are also connected to high values of wealth inequality.
Since SA measures social group network size and Fourscale increases as the ratio of population to resources and thus circumscription increases, GINI Project results support this article’s contention that increases in group size, social network size, and circumscription are implicated in increasing inequality. Households in societies with high SA and Fourscale were hemmed in by inherited land ownership and perhaps tax or tribute obligations, which must have prevented many from “successfully secur[ing] their own resource access, status, and autonomy.” Indeed, GINI researchers found significant increases in inequality in such settings relative to systems where land was readily available.
Societies in settings providing few social opportunities or constraints and where resources are relatively freely available will be maximally egalitarian. We should measure such egalitarianism when possible, possibly on several dimensions, rather than treating it categorically.
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The author received no financial support.
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The author declares no competing interests.