ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record.
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 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 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
- The distribution of power and inclusiveness across deep time.Science advances · 2026Article
- 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
- Labor, land, and the global dynamics of economic inequality.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
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28 authors.
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Abstract
Defining wealth broadly to include wealth in people, relational connections, and material possessions, we examine the prehistory of wealth inequality at the level of the residential units using the consistent proxy of Gini coefficients calculated across areas of contemporaneous residential units. In a sample of >1,100 sites and > 47,000 residential units spanning >10,000 y, persistent wealth inequality typically lags the onset of plant cultivation by more than a millennium. It accompanies landscape modifications and subsistence practices in which land (rather than labor) limits production, and growth of hierarchies of settlement size. Gini coefficients are markedly higher through time in settlements at or near the top of such hierarchies; settlements not enmeshed in these systems remain relatively egalitarian even long after plant and animal domestication. We infer that some households in top-ranked settlements were able to exploit the network effects, agglomeration opportunities, and (eventually) political leverage provided by these hierarchies more effectively than others, likely boosted by efficient intergenerational transmission of material resources after increased sedentism made that more common. Since population growth is associated with increased sedentism, more land-limited production, and the appearance and growth of settlement hierarchies, it is deeply implicated in the postdomestication rise of wealth inequality. Governance practices mediate the degree of wealth inequality, as do technical innovations such as the use of animals for portage, horseback riding, and the development of iron smelting.
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