The Creation and Division of Wealth and the Long-term Consequences of Inequality

This project assembles a working group of scientists to study the prehistory and early history of the development of wealth inequality. The key measure of wealth inequality to be examined is differences in house sizes at any single moment in time, since wealthier households tend to live in larger houses in many different societies. The team will first assemble these data for as many regions as possible.

Then, house-size differences will be compared with information on other social and cultural trends in these societies over time (for example, changing political organization, violence, and population size), in regions where these are known, to understand how changes in these domains affect wealth inequality (and vice versa). The researchers will also examine the relationship between house size and wealth in contemporary societies to better understand how patterns in the archaeological record potentially connect to the dynamics of inequality in the present.

The research is coordinated by the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis and administered by the University of Colorado’s Center for Collaborative Synthesis in Archaeology. The dataset assembled by this team will be made available to other researchers through the Digital Archaeological Record at the close of the project.

It is generally believed that wealth differences that are too extreme may degrade social cohesion due to declining social mobility, reduced aggregate demand, and associated psychological impacts. On the other hand, it is also sometimes claimed that some level of wealth differentiation is necessary to stimulate innovation leading to aggregate prosperity.

This research provides an opportunity to examine such generalizations over very long spans of time using a very broad geographic lens. Drawing on previous research, the degree of difference in house sizes will be measured using the same indices (such as the Gini coefficient) used by economists to characterize differences in wealth or income in societies today.

Changes through time in these measures can be readily correlated with changes in other social indicators to assess the circumstances leading to high, or low, wealth differentiation in the past. The results of this project can help inform the debate on perceived high levels of wealth inequality in many societies today.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.