Timothy A. Kohler - Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences

As we write this, the Republicans in the U.S. Senate are debating whether to revoke tax increases on the wealthy imposed by Obamacare in tandem with their plan to reduce federal health spending for the poor. We have not heard Ginis mentioned in this context, but they are relevant, since Obamacare, though primarily a system of health care, also entailed a small transfer of wealth from rich to poor. While this particular issue will soon be decided, we assume, the underlying tension about whether such transfers should be allowed and how large they should be has long vexed democracies.

Many find disturbing statistics such as that reported by Oxfam in early 2017. The worlds eight richest men, by their calculation, now own as much combined wealth as the entire poorest half of humankind (Economy of the 99 Percent, www.oxfam.org). But others say, in effect, that what really matters is the standard of living and the well-being of all; if the economy today produces so much surplus that some become extremely wealthy, thats OK so long as everyone is doing well. To which many would then respond that in fact not everyone is doing well.

However one feels about these debates, we believe they badly need some historical perspective. If the Gini coefficient measuring wealth concentration in the United States stands around 0.8, as the National Bureau for Economic Research reported in 2008, how anomalous, or how normal, is such a number? True, it appears to be among the highest (most unequal) in the world today, but as archaeologists, we suggest that our inquiry should begin not with conditions today, or in 1950, or even at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but at the dawn of the Holocene some 12,000 years ago. The great age of hunting and gathering, with its largely equal wealth distributions, was then rapidly drawing to a close. As people settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding, did wealth inequalities develop suddenly or slowly? Why did they increase at allor did they? How recent are the high levels of wealth inequality nowexperienced in many developed nations? How would we as archaeologists even be able to tell?

The editors of this volume have been concerned about such issues for many years, and individually we have published some relevant studies (see ). Yet we have been frustrated by the relative lack of attention to these topics among our colleagues and by the spotty nature of the relevant data from prehistory. So we decided to join forces and organized a symposium titled Measuring and Explaining Household Inequality in Antiquity: Inequality from the Bottom Up at the 2016 Society for American Archaeology meetings in Orlando. We invited all the archaeologists we knew who were doing relevant research to participate.

Perhaps we put on a good show; in any case, the Amerind Foundation kindly invited us to revisit the topic in a more leisurely fashion on their beautiful Dragoon, Arizona, campus in fall 2016. The volume now in your hands is the immediate result. We hope that a longer-term result will be the establishment of a rigorous research program on the creation and distribution of wealth in prehistory, the relationship of wealth to broader measures of well-being, and related large-scale questions on the prehistory of the human condition. These issues are too frequently left to philosophers, novelists, and economists.

We editors have more people to thank than your patience as a reader would permit, but let us begin with the Amerind Foundation and its executive director, Christine Szuter, an enthusiastic advocate for this project and a delightful host; our authors, who have been graceful under strict time constraints; and Laura Ellyson, a PhD student in anthropology at Washington State University (WSU), who provided editorial support all along the way. The University of Arizona Press could not have selected more capable outside reviewers than Tim Earle and Ian Morris; their comments helped at several junctures. Kohler also thanks the Department of Anthropology, WSU, and the Santa Fe Institute both for their support and for providing occasions to try out some of the ideas presented in chapters ; they were prepared and analyzed by Timothy Dennehy, also a member of that project. Smith and Dennehy thank fellow project members Benjamin Stanley, Barbara Stark, Abigail York, Sharon Harlan, and April Kamp-Whittaker for help in measuring inequality in a sample of premodern cities.