"Field-defining research that will set the standard for understanding inequality in archaeological contexts"--Provided by publisher.

The Archaeology of Inequality explores the different aspects of social boundaries and articulation by comparing several interdisciplinary approaches for the analysis of the archaeological data, as well as actual case studies from the Prehistory to the Classical world. The book explores slavery, gender, ethnicity and economy as intersecting areas of study within the larger framework of inequality and exemplifies to what degree archaeologists can identify and analyze different patterns of inequality.

Flannery and Marcus demonstrate that the rise of inequality was not simply the result of population increase, food surplus, or the accumulation of valuables but resulted from conscious manipulation of the unique social logic that lies at the core of every human group. Reversing the social logic can reverse inequality, they argue, without violence.

In this authoritative volume, leading researchers offer diverse theoretical perspectives and a wide-range of information on the beginnings and nature of social inequality in past human societies. Their illuminating work investigates the role of status differentiation in traditional archaeological debates and major societal transitions. This volume features numerous case studies from the Old and New World spanning foraging societies to agricultural groups and complex states. Diachronic in view and archaeological in focus, this book will be of significant interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, and students.

Is wealth inequality a universal feature of human societies, or did early peoples live an egalitarian existence? How did inequality develop before the modern era? Did inequalities in wealth increase as people settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding? Why in general do such disparities increase, and how recent are the high levels of wealth inequality now experienced in many developed nations? How can archaeologists tell? Ten Thousand Years of Inequality addresses these and other questions by presenting the first set of consistent quantitative measurements of ancient wealth inequality. The authors are archaeologists who have adapted the Gini index, a statistical measure of wealth distribution often used by economists to measure contemporary inequality, and applied it to house-size distributions over time and around the world. Clear descriptions of methods and assumptions serve as a model for other archaeologists and historians who want to document past patterns of wealth disparity. The chapters cover a variety of ancient cases, including early hunter-gatherers, farmer villages, and agrarian states and empires. The final chapter synthesizes and compares the results. Among the new and notable outcomes, the authors report a systematic difference between higher levels of inequality in ancient Old World societies and lower levels in their New World counterparts. For the first time, archaeology allows humanity’s deep past to provide an account of the early manifestations of wealth inequality around the world. Contributors Nicholas Ames Alleen Betzenhauser Amy Bogaard Samuel Bowles Meredith S. Chesson Abhijit Dandekar Timothy J. Dennehy Robert D. Drennan Laura J. Ellyson Deniz Enverova Ronald K. Faulseit Gary M. Feinman Mattia Fochesato Thomas A. Foor Vishwas D. Gogte Timothy A. Kohler Ian Kuijt Chapurukha M. Kusimba Mary-Margaret Murphy Linda M. Nicholas Rahul C. Oka Matthew Pailes Christian E. Peterson Anna Marie Prentiss Michael E. Smith Elizabeth C. Stone Amy Styring Jade Whitlam

This work examines social inequalities in a diachronic and multivariate approach based on burial grounds in Southwestern Germany.