ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Toward multiscalar measures of inequality in archaeology.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Accounting for uncertainty and bias in archaeological and historical evidence on wealth inequality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Assessing grand narratives of economic inequality across time.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Introducing the Special Feature on housing differences and inequality over the very long term.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Housing inequality and settlement persistence are associated across the archaeological record.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- 100 generations of wealth equality after the Neolithic transitions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Changes in agglomeration and productivity are poor predictors of inequality across the archaeological record.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Kuznets' tides: An archaeological perspective on the long-term dynamics of sustainable development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Assessing neighborhoods, wealth differentials, and perceived inequality in preindustrial societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure commonly used to characterize distributions of socioeconomic quantities. Archaeologists and social scientists have recently adopted this method to analyze ancient inequality by targeting specific proxy variables (e.g., residential unit size, burial data, etc.). Variations in the Gini are then examined in relation to key factors such as time, geography, and subsistence. Yet, Gini coefficients could be obtained across different scales of aggregation, from small neighborhoods within a larger settlement to an ensemble of multiple settlements that are part of the same polity. These different scales of aggregation represent considerable methodological and theoretical challenges, as larger scales might, for example, imply greater social and economic variation within groups and thus affect the Gini coefficients. Furthermore, these issues can also be exacerbated by the idiosyncrasies and limitations of historical and archaeological datasets. This paper discusses the potential and challenges of measuring Gini coefficients at and above the scale of individual archaeological sites, contrasting different approaches and discussing how each can reveal insights into different patterns of past wealth inequality, addressing methodological, empirical, and theoretical implications arising from the multiscalar nature of human interactions.
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