Without archaeology, there is no way to truly examine
economic inequality, its causes, and its consequences over
very long time spans on a global scale. Until recently, most
grand narratives that purported to tell the story of human
inequality over time tended to focus either on European
history of the last five to six centuries or snapshots of
recent societies, derived following colonial encounters with
people around the world. These were then pyramided into
proposed stepped sequences of change that were presumed to
mimic unilinear temporal processes. Whereas the former was
not global, the latter was not even historical.
Well
into the 20th century, European history and its colonial
global impact empirically underpinned our conceptual lenses
on inequality. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that
to the present, our grand narratives on the topic tend to
see increasing wealth disparities as inevitable. Inequality
is seen as a byproduct of population and economic growth,
only potentially reversible through the spread of a
supposedly nascent rationality birthed at the outset of the
modern era, with the rise of the West and the program of
governance and education it offered. Alas, over the last
decades, as inequality spirals, nowhere more than at the
heart of the West in the United States and the United
Kingdom, the long-entrenched grand narratives now seem naive
and out-of-date.
Fortunately, over the last
half-century, archaeologists have gone to work looking
beyond ancient temples and tombs and, instead, have been
mapping sites and excavating houses. By broadening their
vantage beyond kings and courts, archaeologists in many
regions of the world have and continue to gather data on
diverse segments of past societies; farmers as well as
rulers. The systematic cumulation of these data, with a
focus on houses, lies at the core of the GINI
project, a broad collaborative effort led by Timothy A.
Kohler (Washington State University), Amy Bogaard (Oxford
University), and Scott Ortman (University of Colorado),
which has measured and coded more than 50,000 houses from
more than 1,000 archaeological sites.
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During the past
and present, disparities in housing have been one of the
best measures of wealth differences. And with this
unprecedented sample, it is now feasible to trace economic
inequality across much of the globe over time. Now, for the
first time, we can see that neither farming nor population
growth nor urban aggregation are simple determinants of
inequality. Nor can we point to a uniform, unilinear
sequence that accounts for patterns of change across every
continent. Nevertheless, when we look across humanity’s
past, there are broader tendencies, patterns, and even
lessons to absorb and learn.
One clear
trend is that through time, across the broad sweep of human
history, the potential for inequality has grown due to
advances in technology (domesticated crops and animals,
enhanced communication, and advances in transport) and the
increasing size of human aggregations and nations. These
factors are important as they contribute to the growing
extent of economic inequality. Yet alone, they are not
determinative.
The deeply held story that
sedentary settlement, along with farming, prompted the
advent of private property, which generated intra-community
inequality that was then a basis for the emergence of
top-down, autocratic governance simply does not fit most, if
any, global regions. It often took millennia after reliance
on farming for degrees of economic inequality to tick
significantly upward, and only in specific places.
For
the regions we examined as part of this research project,
the potential for inequality was not uniformly realized or
consistently reached. In fact, in general, within global
areas, the variances or ranges in the degree of inequality
expanded through time. Over and over, and in different ways,
people have devised institutions, modes of governance, and
leveling mechanisms to muffle that expansive potential for
rises in inequality.
Regarding the realized degrees of
inequality, population size and the hierarchical complexity
of governing institutions do matter in line with long-held
narratives. But how those governing institutions were
organized, how democratic or autocratic they were, is also a
relevant factor—and one not considered in the past when
Athens and the Roman Republic were wrongly presumed to be
the only political democracies before the modern era. Across
human history, people at certain times and places have made
choices that quell ever present agentic selfishness and
leverage the unmatched human abilities to cooperate and
collaborate with large numbers of non-kin.
And yet,
past and present, democratic or collective institutions are
hard to maintain and sustain. Human cooperation tends to be
situational and contingent. Institutions that are organized
democratically require constant nurturing and participation.
When that is disrupted, participatory, inclusive
institutions break down, which is why we see temporal cycles
and spatial variation in the degree of inequality across
time and geographic space.
Our global sample, along
with other recent studies, also holds clues as to why the
institutions of governance shift along the axis of
concentrated (or personalized) power and more democratic
formations with checks and balances. What we see is that
when our governing institutions are financed by monopolized
resources that are not drawn from the labor and fields of
the local population, but rather through external resources,
power in governance will likely become concentrated in the
hands of a few.
Herd animals, access to metals, and
the control of long-distance exchange routes all seem to
have a relationship to greater potential for inequality.
Whether today or in the deep past, when political power is
wielded autocratically, the checks and leveling mechanisms
that dampen inequality will tend to break down, and, over
time, disparities in wealth will move closer toward their
maximal potentials. In this way, the past is a mirror for
what we now see.
Author Bio: Gary M.
Feinman is an archaeologist and the MacArthur curator of
anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in
Chicago.
This article was produced by Human
Bridges, a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
