No gentry but grave-makers: inequality beyond property accumulation at Neolithic Çatalhöyük

ABSTRACT

Archaeologists have adopted the Gini coefficient to evaluate unequal accumulations of material, supporting narratives modelled on modern inequality discourse. Proxies are defined for wealth and the household, to render 21st century-style economic tensions perceptible in the past. This ‘property paradigm’ treats material culture as a generic rather than substantive factor in unequal pasts. We question this framing while suggesting that the Gini coefficient can prompt a deeper exploration of value. Our study grows from multi-material evaluation of inequality at Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Here we use the Gini coefficient to scrutinise distributions of burial practices among houses. To the expectations of the property paradigm, the result is unintuitive – becoming slightly more equal despite rising social complexity. We explore possible explanations for this result, each pointing to a more substantive link between past futures and differentiated lives as a framework for archaeologies of inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality
• Gini coefficient
• funerary
• Neolithic
• Çatalhöyük
• value

Acknowledgments

All authors contributed data and analysis, and shaped the conclusions – which does not mean that all authors agree wholeheartedly. KK wrote the initial draft; all authors refined the text. KT and KK produced the graphs and tables. The larger working group from which this study derives is led by KT.

We accumulated wisdom through discussions among the Çatalhöyük Research Project; at the SAA Annual Meeting in 2018; in our home institutions; through the editors and two anonymous reviewers. Thank you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Big men’ are mostly, but not always exclusively, biologically male (Lepowski 1990). Some communities recognize genres of ‘Big men’, and there is often a gender component to these categories (Godelier 2011).

2. This is so whether we count only artefacts that were certainly intentional inclusions (Gini coefficients fall from 0.66 to 0.44), or count all artefacts in the burial fill (0.59 to 0.47). Data reflect overall accumulations of grave goods in each house, rather than grave goods per burial as in Fochesato et al. (2021).

3. Necessary data were not available at time of writing for Buildings 1, 3, 52 and 132.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [ECF-2021-330].

Notes on contributors

Kevin Kay

Kevin Kay’s research explores domestic space as a political arena, especially by using building biographies. He is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leicester, leading the project Architecture of dislocation: Neolithic houses and politics of mobility.

Scott Haddow

Scott Haddow’s research explores mortuary practice and social complexity in prehistory, especially considering delayed burial and the retrieval, circulation and redeposition of skeletal elements. He is an Associate Lecturer at Copenhagen University.

Christopher Knüsel

Christopher Knüsel uses bioarchaeology and funerary taphonomy to understand experiences such as labour, violence and death. He is co-editor (with R. Gowland) of The Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains and (with E. Schotsmans) The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology, among others. He is Professor of Biological Anthropology at the Université de Bordeaux.

Camilla Mazzucato

Camilla Mazzucato deploys new tools to understand social and material networks in the past, cross-cutting conventional units such as the household, ‘mega-site’, or indeed human (versus multispecies) society. She is Postdoctoral Researcher on the DFF-funded project Birds as a key line of evidence for human vulnerability and resilience… at Copenhagen University.

Marco Milella

Marco Milella researches lifestyle and funerary patterns across Eurasia from the Neolithic to Medieval period, with focus on preindustrial forms of kinship, social and biological status differentiation. He is Scientific Staff at the University of Bern and Co-PI of the international project ”Celts” up & down the Alps: Origin and Mobility patterns on both sides of the Alps during the Late Iron Age (4th-1st century BC) (www.celtudalps.com)

Rena Veropoulidou

Rena Veropoulidou interrogates molluscs and other aquatic fauna as indicators of foodways, seasonality and social pressures on landscapes, as well as the role of molluscs in practices such as pigment and visual display. She is an archaeologist with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports.

Katheryn C. Twiss

Katheryn Twiss uses food as a lens through which to view past societies: the organization of work, enactment of social structures, and interrelationship of feasting and everyday consumption. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University and the author of The Archaeology of Food: Identity, Politics, and Ideology in the Prehistoric and Historic Past.