Archaeologists often have difficulty demonstrating the relevance of their research to present-day problems and concerns. This volume, edited by Timothy Kohler and Michael Smith, is a welcome addition to the archaeological literature because it demonstrates how archaeological data can be used to frame questions that are germane to the present. It focuses on the origin of inequality, using Gini indexes—statistical measures used by economic studies to assess inequality—as the method of choice. Social and economic forms of inequality, driven by wealth disparities, are major problems facing our society. We are all familiar with the controversy over the 1% who control as much wealth as the other 99% of the combined world's population. But how did this disparity happen, and what are its impacts? While history can provide limited answers to these questions, archaeology yields a far longer record in the historic and prehistoric past.
This edited volume is organized into 13 chapters. The introduction by Smith, Kohler, and Gary Feinman presents background information to frame inequality and to explain how Gini indexes can be used to measure house sizes as indicators of wealth. The two methodological chapters that follow, the first by Christian Peterson and Robert Drennan and the second by Rahul Oka and his colleagues, are the strongest chapters in the book, doing much to lay out the issues involved in using Gini indexes: they note the need for multiple Ginis and large sample sizes and that two equivalent Ginis can indicate very different things if supplementary data are not used.
These three introductory chapters are followed by detailed archaeological analyses on different-level societies in diverse parts of the world. Anna Marie Prentiss and her colleagues examine a complex “fisher-forger” society in British Columbia, concluding that “Gini coefficients are subject to many biases,” but are “useful for defining variation in the nature of inequality” (p. 123). Their study shows that inequality can be manifested in differential access to food and goods, with house size being a less important indicator. The next two chapters examine prehistoric cultures from the American Southwest. Kohler and Laura Ellyson study sites in the central Mesa Verde and Chaco areas. They show that elite Great Houses are associated with greater inequity, but also demonstrate that social inequality in the Chaco area is in line with that found in other agricultural societies, that wealth inequalities tended to increase at the onset of “periods of exploitation” (p. 148), and that there was a reduction in the range of inequality during exploitation periods. In contrast, Matthew Pailes, looking at the Hohokam archaeological data in the American Southwest, concludes that there was “mostly negligible change through time in the degree of inequality experienced by Hohokam families” (p. 171), even as population increased; he suggests that while there was “increasing social complexity in the Hohokam region, there is only scant evidence of any wealth inequality” (p. 173). Alleen Betzenhauser next investigates archaeological inequality during the Mississippian Period in the American Southeast using the floor areas from more than one thousand excavated buildings. She demonstrates that sample selection and inclusion significantly alter the result of a Gini coefficient and its interpretation (p. 192), arguing that in some cases the Gini indexes are measuring “architectural standardization rather than household inequality” (p. 195) and that the least amount of inequality occurs during the late Mississippian Periods.
Chapter 8 is a comparative chapter analyzing the archaeological data from northern Mesopotamia and southwestern Germany in terms of farming, inequality, and urbanization. Amy Bogaard and her colleagues show that mean house area and Gini coefficients are often related, even if site size and Gini coefficients are not; they also examine the impact of both living and storage space on wealth inequality and highlight the differences between these two Old World areas in their trajectories toward urbanism and social inequality. Elizabeth Stone next examines the use of Gini indexes in southern Mesopotamia, making use of both the archaeological record and Quickbird satellite imagery. She finds a strong relationship between house size and courtyard size. Based on the striking differences in Gini indexes based on burial data versus housing data (p. 255), she argues that the distribution of house sizes reflects income, while that of burial goods reflects prestige and ideology. Feinman, Ronald Faulseit, and Linda Nicholas examine wealth inequality in the Valley of Oaxaca: they measure terrace area, house size, and patio area for their settlements, contrasting these Gini coefficients with the associated domestic assemblages for 13 excavated houses (p. 275). They conclude by noting that “one Gini value for any time or place may not be sufficient to understand the complexity of inequality” (p. 280) and that we should “expect to see chronological variance in the degree of inequality” (p. 282). The final chapter is a summation of “deep inequality” explored by all of the major authors in the book that comparatively examines inequality for 62 archaeological cases in the New and Old Worlds. It appropriately ends by arguing that archaeologists are no longer reliant on other disciplines and that “we can begin to forge our own narratives” (p. 314) about issues that affect modern society.
There, however, are weaknesses in this volume. Like any study in archaeological quantification, it has inconsistencies in how key metrics are established; and as with radiocarbon dates, while a Gini coefficient may be precise, the interpretation of the index may not necessarily be accurate (e.g., Chapter 3). There are other potential issues with some of the numbers used or assigned and in some classifications of archaeological sites, specifically in Chapter 11 in relation to Mesoamerican sites. For instance, the total population for Teotihuacan is listed as 14,485 in Table 11.1, which is the same number given for its households; a similar error in the number of households and total population is also found for Mayapan, Capilco, and Tenochtitlan. The total site populations for Tikal and Caracol do not match published figures, and no supporting data or references are provided to indicate why these numbers were used. References in Chapters 1 and 11 are made to supplementary materials associated with an earlier 2017 publication, but similarly problematic population estimates without easily accessible supporting data, methodology, and references are found here as well. I hope that some of these issues can be corrected and resolved before the volume appears in paperback, so that researchers are able to see from whom and how these data were derived.
Despite these referencing and numerical issues, this is an important volume that serves as a concrete example of how and why archaeology is relevant in the modern world. Any serious researcher on past social complexity should add it to his or her methodological repertoire.
