Socio-Political indicators via Archeological Gini
In a book edited by Timothy A. Kohler and Michael E. Smith
Kohler et al. wrote:
Theory, as reviewed [earlier], leads us to expect that wealth disparities (measured throughout this chapter as Gini indices computed over house-size distributions) tend to increase as
climatic stability promotes increased resource density, predictability, and strong gradients in resource values;
group size or regional population density increases;
mobility decreases sufficiently to allow resources to be transmitted across generations, potentially accumulating;
one or more transmissible resources becomes scarce;
norms of private or corporate property in resources develop, placing limits on resource sharing within groups;
production beyond the subsistence needs of households—expected to be most prevalent in agricultural societies—presents opportunities for exploitation and opportunity hoarding …. such that Ginis measuring wealth inequality should in general increase with increases in surplus; and
more-exclusionary governance institutions dominate.
All the societies considered here date to the Holocene, so differences in the degree of climatic stability they experienced were probably fairly minor even though climatic variability undoubtedly affected individual sequences.
In a number of places in the early Holocene, increases in group size and regional population size tended to co-occur with decreased mobility and resource intensification, in some cases leading to agriculture. More generally, the factors labelled 2-5 above are so enmeshed in co-causality that it is easier to pick out modal categories resulting from their interactions than it is to place societies on scales denoting each dimension separately, especially given the uncertainties inherent in the archaeological record.
For example, hunter-gatherers are often (though not invariably) organized in small groups with low regional population densities and employ relatively high mobility to prevent local resource depression. Resource sharing is often more common in such groups than among horticulturalists and agriculturalists.
Horticulturalists are typically less mobile than foragers but more mobile than agriculturalists (though some of the Chinese Neolithic societies … labeled as “horticulturalists”, appear to have been fully sedentary) … [H]orticulturalists [may be considered] to be labor-rather than land-limited, with greater levels of investment in embodied and relational wealth than in material wealth. Because these types of wealth are less transmissible across generations than material wealth (Big Men, for example, cannot transfer alliances they built to their children), horticulturalists are likely to be more equal than agriculturalists, though they also tend to be somewhat less equal than foragers given their generally reduced mobility.
For these reasons, as well as the likelihood that agriculturalists are more commonly able to produce surpluses subject to unequal distribution and even monopolization, we expect our sample to show the greatest wealth equality for foragers and the highest inequality for agriculturalists, with horticulturalists in an intermediate position—as found in both ethnographic (references) and historical (references) studies …
[MGH: Following is most interesting for me, assists in building categories]
The patterning of Gini coefficients by site type displays similar trends and variance. Our site typology of villages, towns, and cities is based on both site size and a concept of urban function. An urban function is an activity or institution in a settlement that affects a larger hinterland (Bruce Trigger). Here we identify urban functions as features or facilities whose likely use extended beyond the settlement to a hinterland; we call them “central features”. Examples would include a chief ’s house, a temple of a type found only in larger settlements (and thus presumably serving a population larger than its own settlement), and a feature whose design and construction required knowledge or labor beyond the individual settlement. Based on an analogy with central place theory (references inc. Bruce Trigger), central features can be classified into levels.
Lower-level features are more widespread within a settlement system and pertain to a smaller catchment area, while higher-level features are more infrequent and tend to be found only in the largest settlements, where they pertain to a larger catchment area or hinterland. Our typology is not intended to be a comprehensive classification that will work cleanly for all ancient settlement systems; rather, it is a rough approximation of the extent to which settlements operated on a social scale beyond that of the daily lives of their own residents.
On the basis of these considerations, a village is defined as any settlement of one thousand or fewer residents that lacks a central feature. A town is defined as either a settlement with more than a thousand residents but lacking a central feature or a settlement of more than two hundred residents that has one or two lower-level (typically small or moderately sized) central features. A city is any settlement with more than one thousand residents and one or more high-level (i.e., large and prominent) central features.
Although the central tendencies of Ginis for villages, towns, and cities increase in the expected direction, the categories overlap considerably. In agrarian states, the wealthiest elites typically live in cities, which also usually house the ruler or highest- ranking leader and the regional institutions. Therefore, we might expect higher levels of inequality in cities than in towns …
… [The] link between urbanization and inequality may have been different in the distant past. While house size is generally a good measure of wealth (as attested in the chapters in this book), this relationship may weaken in an urban settlement if building a house proportionate to the wealth of the wealthiest residents (typically members of the elite class) is difficult or impossible. This may reflect both energetic limits on wealth concentration in the ancient world and high land values in the centers of cities.
The Source:
Timothy A. Kohler, Michael E. Smith, Amy Bogaard, Christian E. Peterson, Alleen Betzenhauser, Gary M. Feinman, Rahul C. Oka, Matthew Pailes, Anna Marie Prentiss, Elizabeth C. Stone, Timothy J. Dennehy, and Laura J. Ellys, ‘Deep Inequality: Summary Conclusions’, in Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: the Archaeology of Wealth Differences, edited by Timothy .A. Kohler and Michael .E. Smith [pp. 290-291, 297-298]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.