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Inequality is present to varying degrees in all human societies, pre-modern and contemporary. For archaeological contexts, variation in house size reflects differences in labor investments and serves as a robust means to assess wealth across populations small and large. The Gini coefficient, which measures the degree of concentration in the distribution of units within a population, has been employed as a standardized metric to evaluate the extent of inequality. Here, we employ Gini coefficients to assess wealth inequality at four nested socio-spatial scales–the micro-region, the polity, the district, and the neighborhood–at two medium size, peripheral Classic Maya polities located in southern Belize. We then compare our findings to Gini coefficients for other Classic Maya polities in the Maya heartland and to contemporaneous polities across Mesoamerica. We see the patterning of wealth inequality across the polities as a consequence of variable access to networks of exchange. Different forms of governance played a role in the degree of wealth inequality in Mesoamerica. More autocratic Classic Maya polities, where principals exercised degrees of control over exclusionary exchange networks, maintained high degrees of wealth inequality compared to most other Mesoamerican states, which generally are characterized by more collective forms of governance. We examine how household wealth inequality was reproduced at peripheral Classic Maya polities, and illustrate that economic inequity trickled down to local socio-spatial units in this prehispanic context.

Ancient economies have been characterized by many researchers as localized, highly controlled by political actors, and static over long periods of time. In Mesoamerica, recent research has cast doubt on these views, with the recognition of early maiket place exchange, production by households for exchange, and the wideranging integration of communities into regional trade networks. Here, we expand on an earlier network analysis of obsidian assemblages from the Maya region during the Classic and Postclassic periods to incorporate data for all of Mesoamerica between 900 BC and AD 1520. Using both visual graphical representations and formal network metrics, we find that the Mesoamerican economy was dynamic and generally not highly centralized over time. The topology of this interactive network underwent significant changes over time. In particular, trends towards decreasing network hierarchy and size culminated in the highly commercialized \"international\" economy of Late Postclassic period as noted in previous studies. Based on this analysis, we make the case that the ancient Mesoamerican economy was neither predominantly top-down nor static, and so does not conform with oft-held presumptions regarding preindustrial economies.

The authors use a social network analysis to map the changing patterns of obsidian supply among the Maya during the period of Classic to Postclassic transition. The quantity of obsidian received from different sources was calculated for 121 sites and the network analysis showed how the relative abundance of material from different sources shifted over time. A shift from inland to coastal supply routes appears to have contributed to the collapse of inland Maya urban centres. The methods employed clearly have a high potential to reveal changing economic networks in cases of major societal transitions elsewhere in the world.

The Neolithic (ca. 8000–1900 B.C.) underpinnings of early Chinese civilization had diverse geographic and cultural foundations in distinct traditions, ways of life, subsistence regimes, and modes of leadership. The subsequent Bronze Age (ca. 1900–221 B.C.) was characterized by increasing political consolidation, expansion, and heightened interaction, culminating in an era of a smaller number of warring states. During the third century B.C., the Qin Dynasty first politically unified this fractious landscape, across an area that covers much of what is now China, and rapidly instituted a series of infrastructural investments and other unifying measures, many of which were maintained and amplified during the subsequent Han Dynasty. Here, we examine this historical sequence at both the national and macroscale and more deeply for a small region on the coast of the Shandong Province, where we have conducted several decades of archaeological research. At both scales, we examine apparent shifts in the governance of local diversity and some of the implications both during Qin–Han times and for the longer durée.

Because of advances in methods and theory, archaeology now addresses issues central to debates in the social sciences in a far more sophisticated manner than ever before. Coupled with methodological innovations, multiscalar archaeological studies around the world have produced a wealth of new data that provide a unique perspective on long-term changes in human societies, as they document variation in human behavior and institutions before the modern era. We illustrate these points with three examples: changes in human settlements, the roles of markets and states in deep history, and changes in standards of living. Alternative pathways toward complexity suggest how common processes may operate under contrasting ecologies, populations, and economic integration.

Investigations of the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and collective action provide productive venues for theorizing social complexity, yet this multidisciplinary scholarship contains analytical and epistemological tensions that require reconciliation. We propose a course for integration of this diverse literature to investigate the emergence and developmental trajectories of complex societies. Greater attention to collective action problems, cultural mechanisms that promote cooperation, differentiation of human interests, and multiscalar research designs provide firmer conceptual underpinnings for a theoretically grounded cultural evolutionary framework. The case of agricultural intensification in pre-Hispanic highland Mexico is used to illustrate major points of the paper.

To date, most scholarly perspectives on ancient economies have been mischaracterized in part through a reliance on dichotomous frameworks (e.g., primitivist/modern, embedded/free) that draw false qualitative distinctions between past and more contemporary economic systems. This discussion challenges the metrics used in such frames and therefore the antimarket presumption prevalent in extant models of economic practices associated with ancient states. Shifting views of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican economies are highlighted in part to illustrate how past theoretical frames helped deflect mounting evidence for markets drawn from archaeological and textual research. Implications for similar reenvisioning of the ancient economies of Bronze Age Greece are proposed, including a potentially greater role for marketplace exchanges and less direct palatial control over all facets of exchange and production. Join the discussion athttp://www.ajaonline.org/forum/1554.

Analyses of house-size distributions in the Old and New World showed that wealth disparities increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale. Historical rise and rise of the rich Beneath headlines about booms and busts and other economic disturbance lies a deeper problem: wealth inequality. But what is its history, and what are the larger social factors that determine the disparate distribution of wealth? Timothy Kohler and colleagues look at the evolution of inequality worldwide since the Neolithic era, around 11,000 years ago, using house size as a proxy for calculating the Gini coefficient, a measure of wealth inequality. The study shows that, as may be expected, wealth inequality has generally increased. Unexpectedly however, inequality increased far more in the Old World of Europe and Asia than in the New (North and Central America). Even in highly urban New World sites, house sizes are generally similar. There are no enormous palaces, which one expects in Old World urban contexts. The authors suggest that the inherent wealth provided by large domesticated animals could explain the imbalance. Horses, for example, allowed people to ride around acquiring wealth from others. How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility 1 , 2 . However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records 3 , 4 , which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a long-term perspective. Although various archaeological proxies for wealth, such as burial goods 5 , 6 or exotic or expensive-to-manufacture goods in household assemblages 7 , have been proposed, the first is not clearly connected with households, and the second is confounded by abandonment mode and other factors. As a result, numerous questions remain concerning the growth of wealth disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale 8 . Here we show that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions. However, unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North America and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, became evident after the end of the Neolithic period. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia were initially due to the greater availability of large mammals that could be domesticated, because they allowed more profitable agricultural extensification 9 , and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities (political units that cohere via identity, ability to mobilize resources, or governance) to sizes that were not possible in North America and Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans 10 , 11 . We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate other work to enlarge this sample to include societies in South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania that were under-sampled or not included in this study.