Balancing the scales: archaeological approaches to social inequality

ABSTRACT

Archaeology lends a critical perspective to research on social inequality due to the field’s unique access to deep history, emphasis on materiality, and explicit incorporation of multiple lines of evidence. This paper offers a concise overview of archaeological approaches aimed at students and scholars in other fields. We develop a categorization of disciplinary strategies, arguing that archaeologists address institutionalized inequality through examining inequalities in the accumulation of goods or resources (economic differentiation); access to resources or knowledge (social differentiation), and inequalities in action, the ability to make decisions for oneself or others (political differentiation). We illustrate these categories with reference to the distinctions between material, relational, and embodied wealth. We draw upon a broad range of geographic, chronological, and cultural case studies to illustrate the flexibility and utility of archaeological methods for answering questions about inequality in human societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Archaeology
• inequality
• wealth

Acknowledgments

Catherine Tan (Vassar College) provided a sociological perspective on an initial draft of this paper. The manuscript was improved by constructive feedback from two reviewers and the editors of this special issue.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For example, ten people are given a total of one hundred euros. If each person receives €10, the Gini coefficient is 0; if one person receives €73 while the remaining nine people are given €3 each, the Gini coefficient is 0.63.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jess Beck

Jess Beck is an Ad Astra Fellow and Assistant Professor in the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on bioarchaeology, social inequality, and knowledge production.

Colin P. Quinn

Colin P. Quinn is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hamilton College. His research interests center on emergent inequality, human-environment interaction in mining landscapes, and social transformations.