https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0679-3796
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.
Introduction
Tsing (Citation2015, 62) describes capitalism as ‘a system for concentrating wealth, which makes possible new investments, which further concentrate wealth’. This framing subtly emphasises that inequality is not simply about having wealth. It is about what wealth does next, how it enchains one action to another and points toward unequal futures. Accumulations beget further accumulation: capitalism is not so much a structure of the world as for changing the world.
We find archaeologists’ engagement with tools of contemporary economics (e.g. the Gini coefficient) provocative, both when these tools highlight difference in past societies and when they clash with realities of past worlds. We question approaches that assume capitalist dynamics throughout prehistory: searching for accumulations of ‘property’ that would have naturally facilitated further accumulation. This paper explores alternative framings of inequality data, taking Neolithic burials at Çatalhöyük as our case study.
Çatalhöyük has often been central to discussions of emerging inequality. In the first half of the 7th millennium BCE, Çatalhöyük saw increasingly distinctive concentrations of material culture in buildings, fitting expected links between settlement growth and social complexity. However, our analyses show quantifiable differences in burial between houses decreasing even as the town’s social geography became more complex.
Subsequent contextual analysis explores why burial data may not track social differences in the same way as other material culture. It foregrounds the temporality and social contingency of burial practices. Building on Graeber’s (Citation2001) theory of value and ethnographies of non-capitalist accumulation, we explore multiple possible pasts that might underlie our data. Each imagines that burials transformed Neolithic people and enchained unequal futures – but none asserts a straightforward connection between accumulating burials and becoming more powerful. Although we do not produce one definitive ‘reading’ of inequality at Çatalhöyük, we do illustrate the importance of engaging with the specifics of accumulation in practice.
Beyond the property paradigm
A central strand of research into deep histories of inequality uses the Gini coefficient to compare ‘levels of inequality’ in past societies (Bowles, Smith, and Borgerhoff Mulder Citation2010; Kohler and Smith Citation2019). A mainstay statistic of contemporary economics, the Gini coefficient supplies a single-value measure of how concentrated or dispersed material is among subgroups in a sample. A coefficient of 1 indicates that all material is concentrated in one subgroup. A coefficient of 0 indicates that the material is evenly dispersed among subgroups. Values between 0 and 1 present a scale of concentration or dispersal. In capitalist economies, the Gini coefficient permits rapid comparison of the extent to which wealth (often as represented in income tax filings) is distributed through a population.
Many applications of the Gini coefficient work within what we term the property paradigm. This implicitly connects accumulation of material to the empowerment of people: wellbeing and status are seen as products of proprietary accumulations of money, material, or land. Having more enables one to do more. A consequent assumption is that people naturally seek to accumulate various forms of wealth. Although useful distinctions are sometimes drawn between ‘relational’ and ‘material’ wealth (i.e. between prestige and physical luxury) (Bowles, Smith, and Borgerhoff Mulder Citation2010), archaeological narratives linking these categories to specific material culture tend to ascribe a similar maximising logic to a wide range of materials.
The modern basis of this logic hardly needs mention. Wealth profoundly impacts people’s health, education, political power, housing and more, so quantifying financial inequality captures profound differences in people’s potential to thrive and propensity to suffer. But how far does the logic of the property paradigm extend into non-capitalist societies?
Many studies of past inequality translate archaeological data into the terms of the property paradigm. Some quantifiable material culture is defined as a proxy for ‘wealth’/‘income’, and some dimension of the archaeological data defines who the proprietors of that wealth were (). For example, Fochesato et al. (Citation2021) argue that objects placed in graves reflect wealth disparities between individuals (a long-debated premise: Parker Pearson Citation1982). More commonly, houses are treated as proxies for wealth-owning households, and archaeologists compare the size or contents of dwellings as if comparing livelihoods of discrete groups of people. Other studies compare storerooms or grain bins in houses as indicators of agrarian ‘income’.
Table 1. A selection of Gini-inequality publications in archaeology, with proxies for ‘wealth’ and ‘proprietors’.
Numerous authors associate rises in Gini coefficients with the emergence of elites. However, such narratives encounter several problems. Gini coefficients are arguably too readily discussed in-text as ‘wealth measures’ (Kohler and Higgins Citation2016, 694–5), ‘access to wealth’ (Smith et al. Citation2014, 320), or labelled in graphs and figures as ‘wealth inequality’ (Bogaard, Fochesato, and Bowles Citation2019). This may draw discussion away from the fact that what is really being measured is usually variability in the size of domestic architecture. Questions about the substantive difference that building larger or smaller houses created in past lives may thus be minimised. Surely variability among Palaeolithic pit houses did not have the same consequences as variability among villas at Pompeii; it is thus potentially misleading to compare these two measurements in a single narrative frame (Bogaard, Fochesato, and Bowles Citation2019, ). Furthermore, Ames, and Grier (Citation2020) note that the relationship between social groups and architecture is not straightforward, and different ways of defining ‘domestic units’ in architectural terms may produce contradictory Gini coefficients. Even if we assume that houses stand in straightforwardly for people (contra Kay Citation2020a), there are further contingencies in translating house dimensions/contents into social inequality. For example we must assume that households did not share ‘wealth’ to a confounding extent; that there are universal incentives to maximise house size; that larger residences corresponded to greater capacities in other domains of social life.
At its best, studying inequality invites us to scrutinise how moving material around, engaging in projects, concentrating and distributing things and labour generates qualities of human life. To the extent that it assumes a ‘default’ attitude toward property, community and accumulation, the property paradigm may close off important dynamics of difference in the past.
And yet – there are quantifiable concentrations of material in the past. Crops, tools, and artworks did accumulate disproportionately in some places; disproportionate effort was invested in constructing some residences; some burials were extraordinary. Our concerns about the property paradigm is not an argument against quantitative study of material inequality. Rather we aim to repurpose the Gini coefficient in a more richly theorised notion of how accumulation and dispersal mattered.
Value and past futures: producing people
Extensive discourses in economic anthropology, archaeologies of agency and feminist (pre)history problematise, rather than assume, the connection between accumulating/distributing things and the possibilities and constraints of human lives. The broader literature is too great to summarise here, but two ideas help to untangle counterintuitive inequality data in this article.
The first is value. Following Graeber (Citation2001), examining value involves scrutinising the link between material actions and past futures (cf. Gardner and Wallace Citation2020; Robinson Citation2017; Sahlins Citation2013). Graeber integrates two strands of thinking around value: the economic tradition in which value is a measurable property of things, and the ethical tradition in which values (plural) are premises about behaviour. Subtly, each tradition implies the other. Material is valuable within the terms set by behavioural projects – because it enables people to do things – and those projects matter because they are material and intersubjective (Robb Citation2010). Graeber thus defines value as ‘the importance of action’ within a certain context: how material acts (producing a pot, piercing someone’s ear, burying a body) shape potential futures. Crucially, he suggests that the importance of action usually lies in producing specific kinds of people, transforming children into adults, neighbours into debtors, or living people into ancestors. Differences in practice thus open up some life opportunities and foreclose others.
The second crucial idea is that there are far more forms of material accumulation (or dispersal) than capitalist societies practice. In many ethnographically-attested communities, levelling mechanisms assert material egalitarianism, without foreclosing difference in charisma, age, or gender (Lee Citation1969). Others see ‘leaders’ rapidly gain and lose prosperity and power (Wengrow and Graeber Citation2015). Elites in some communities abstain from material wealth (Laidlaw Citation1995).
Of particular interest are ‘big man’ political systems, most frequently identified in Melanesia (e.g. Sahlins Citation1963). ‘Big man’ systems value the influence that individuals gain by giving things away or helping others. This is not altruism: ‘big men’ may engage in exploitation or coercion to obtain material to give away (Weiner Citation1976). As they give gifts, supply feasts and perform feats, they become involved in myriad decisions in the broader community. But this status has sharp practical limits. The more influential a ‘big man’ becomes, the more effort he or sheFootnote1 must exert to meet commitments. This may lead to fewer comforts, less material prosperity, and risk of exhaustion. Notably in Kohler et al.’s (Citation2017, ) global house-size variability study, ‘big man’ societies stand out with consistently low Gini coefficients: not for lack of inequality, but because their inequalities implicate materials differently. Recent anthropology has complicated this picture, clarifying that some ‘big men’ do leverage their influence to gain lives of luxury (often in collaboration with capitalist interests) (Strathern and Stewart Citation2000).
If value is the importance of material action for creating people’s future capacities, ‘big men’ make a powerful counterpoint to entrepreneurs. Under capitalism, accumulating financial resources produces radically autonomous beings. Indeed, billionaires have recently sought independence from iconically inevitable things such as gravity, death and taxes. In ‘big man’ economies, the act of giving creates far-reaching influence, but ‘big men’ place their time, bodies and things at the disposal of others – surrendering much autonomy.
Turning to inequality at Çatalhöyük, we bear in mind the variability of value. Accumulating and dispersing things (or bodies) helps to differentiate people, negotiate futures and establish social capacities, but it does not do so in the same way everywhere.
An inequality paradox: burial at Çatalhöyük
Çatalhöyük was first inhabited around 7100 BCE (Bayliss et al. Citation2015). It initially comprised clusters of mudbrick dwellings interspersed with open spaces. Over time it became larger overall, and buildings were wedged into almost all of its open spaces. By ca. 6700, it was a radically dense settlement of perhaps several thousand people, traversed in part by walking across rooftops and descending into buildings by ladder. After ca. 6500, the site dispersed, continuing as a lower-density settlement into the 6th millennium (Marciniak et al. Citation2015).
Many narratives feature Neolithic settlements as likely locations for the first emergence of social inequality. However, it is now clear that interpreting the Neolithic in terms of social hierarchy is far from straightforward (Hodder Citation2022). Many analyses do show social and economic roles becoming more diversified between the ‘Early’ (7100–6700) and ‘Middle’ (6700–6500) periods at Çatalhöyük (chronology following Hodder Citation2022). Many buildings were richly decorated with sculpture and painting, while others contain less visual elaboration (Hodder and Pels Citation2010). Material culture such as body ornamentation, figurines and lithics reveals makers of a range of skill levels (e.g. Bains et al. Citation2013). And certain material culture, such as groundstone tools and large timbers, are recovered disproportionately from a subset of houses (e.g. Wright Citation2014). Yet other analyses, such as Mazzucato’s (Citation2019) network analysis, complicate the picture, showing higher qualitative similarity between houses despite rising quantitative dissimilarity in the sums of things inside them. This complex picture presents ample material with which to study inequality – and also calls for caution.
Many authors see Çatalhöyük communities as organised around ‘history houses’, ‘memory houses’ or ‘meeting houses’, set apart by accumulations of some sort, whose inhabitants would have enjoyed outsized influence and opportunity (Hodder and Pels Citation2010; Kuijt Citation2018; Wright Citation2014). Others have discerned mechanisms of differentiation in Neolithic practices, arguing for the emergence of private food storage (Bogaard et al. Citation2009), central roles for elders (Pearson and Meskell Citation2015), and varying levels of access or seclusion for different households (Düring Citation2001).
However, studies rarely agree about which houses were ‘socially central’. illustrates this by evaluating houses in one Middle period neighbourhood using several published criteria for ‘special’ buildings. Each set of criteria highlights different buildings. Incidentally, none identifies the largest and most storage-rich building (Building 59) as ‘special’.
Table 2. Size, storage and visual elaboration in one middle period neighbourhood (Level North G). Criteria for identifying ‘special’ or ‘central’ buildings are noted at right, following Düring (Citation2001), Hodder (Citation2014) and Kuijt (Citation2018).
A second challenge is the fragmented nature of inequality studies. Many studies focus one or two materials/practices, treating those measures as indicative of inequality across domains (e.g. Mazzucato et al. Citation2022). This is compounded by the property paradigm: buildings are sometimes treated as stand-ins for human beings (i.e. households), and sums of material culture within their walls are treated as reflections of those people’s social position. Ambiguous, contradictory or changing traits of buildings become difficult to analyse (Kay Citation2020b).
In response to these challenges, Hodder (Citation2022) has recently argued for a ‘molar’ model of social structure at Çatalhöyük–one where overarching forms of value and habitus supported many domain-specific ways of connecting people together and defining their differences. He contrasts this with societies that arrange people into partially autonomous, formulaic (‘molecular’) groupings that hold true in almost all aspects of life. Put simply: some people may have been grouped together as a ‘social unit’ with ‘central’ people/places in one practice (e.g. burial) yet may have been grouped differently in other practices (e.g. harvesting crops).
Declining burial inequality at Çatalhöyük?
To investigate domain-specific inequalities, we compiled data on a range of materials: artefacts such as clay objects and lithics; animal remains and botanical residues; information about the size and internal structure of buildings; as well as burials and display elements. Our goal was to see if narratives about inequality built around select datasets held up within a more robust, multi-practice evaluation of Neolithic life.
An initial step involved summing materials on a house-by-house basis. Despite the limitations of such an approach (Kay Citation2020a; Twiss Citation2012), this first move provides an overview of the distribution of materials around the site. We carried out a stratigraphic review so that our sums only include materials incorporated during construction, occupation, and immediate closure of buildings. We subsequently calculated the Gini coefficient for different material types in the site’s Early, Middle and Late periods. The overall contours of this data are the focus of another work (Twiss et al. Citationunder revision). Broadly speaking, they fit the picture of rising social complexity through the early and middle 7th millennium as the town grew denser and more populous. Across (most of) the board, Gini coefficients rise between the Early and Middle periods, from relatively even distributions to considerably more unequal ones. (Late period dynamics involve extensive social changes and evidentiary complications beyond the scope of the present argument).
However, not all data sets produced the expected values. In particular, data related to funerary practice produced slightly falling Gini coefficients (i.e. more even distribution among houses) (). Intramural burial was practised throughout the periods in question as the most common funerary rite. Large concentrations of burials occurred in just two excavated Early buildings (Building 17 and its superimposed successor, Building 6), with contemporary structures containing fewer (Buildings 18, 23, 43, 160, 161) or no burials (Building 2, likely Building 118). Similar patterns were reported during the 1960s excavations of the site, when more Early structures were excavated (Düring Citation2003). Although there are buildings without burials in the Middle period, the majority of structures did contain burials. A few buildings contained dramatic concentrations (up to 60 MNI in a single structure) yet most fall within a narrow range, from a few burials to around a dozen. Overall, this produces a slight decline in the Gini coefficient for MNI in buildings as the site grew, from 0.53 to 0.45.
Figure 1. Gini coefficients for burials in houses at çatalhöyük.
We investigated other ways to quantify burials: perhaps buildings were distinguished by the kinds of people buried within, or their manner of burial. Although there is more to interrogate, most metrics produced the same pattern. Houses became more equal over time in the amount of material culture accompanying human bodies into the grave.Footnote2 They remained quite even in terms of ‘access’ to adult as opposed to subadult bodies (Gini coefficients 0.30 [Early] and 0.29 [Middle]), despite a site-wide emphasis on age as a distinguishing factor (Haddow et al. Citation2021; Knüsel et al. Citation2021; Pearson and Meskell Citation2015). The only emerging inequality concerned secondary burials: this practice is minimally evident in the Early period, while a few houses contain disproportionately many secondary burials in the Middle period.
Our data thus defy initial expectations. Burials have been considered a primary way that houses (and associated people) became central, powerful or influential at Çatalhöyük (Hodder and Pels Citation2010; Kuijt Citation2018). From Early to Middle there is evidence that specific houses were becoming central – somehow – in particular tasks or domains, based on materials accumulated within them (Twiss et al. Citationunder revision). Yet burials became slightly more evenly distributed. This unexpected outcome invites us to rethink how accumulating interments in houses (or dispersing them among houses) worked within Çatalhöyük’s value systems.
Burial and value in action
How did burials produce or accentuate differences between people, and how might these differences have shaped people’s futures? We briefly highlight a few contours of burial activity at the site, especially the importance of sequence and temporality – phenomena that became possible, indeed crucial, as burials accumulated.
History-making and performance
Çatalhöyük burials appear to have involved far-reaching community politics. People buried together in any given house do not appear to reflect a household’s dead. They are rarely close genetic relatives (Pilloud and Larsen Citation2011; Yaka et al. Citation2021). In the Early and Middle periods, people buried together may have had different diets, and perhaps came from different commensal groups (Pearson and Meskell Citation2015; Pearson et al. Citation2021). Many authors see ‘burial communities’ larger than the household at work (Carter et al. Citation2015; Hodder Citation2022; Kuijt Citation2018). It seems likely that there was significant latitude in where a dead person was buried, by whom, and how. Large numbers of people may have engaged in decision-making in the days or weeks after a death.
Yet burials were not isolated events. There can be striking interaction between sequential burials. This becomes especially clear as archaeothanatological and taphonomic analyses clarify the sequence of actions that produced funerary assemblages. In the Middle period, disturbances to earlier graves by subsequent interments in the same location increased substantially. These disturbed primary burials account for more than a quarter (28%) of Middle period burials, compared with 10% for the Early period (Haddow et al. Citation2021). Other burials in the same house may share similarities in accompanying artefacts, body manipulation and modification, and location ().
Figure 2. Funerary citations at çatalhöyük (a) Burial F.7961, building 131, middle period: adult female with obsidian mirror (circled) and five isolated crania at feet (not shown). (b) Burial 3630 in the same location, after the house was rebuilt as building 124. Primary adolescent burial, one primary disturbed burial and two isolated crania, with obsidian mirrors (circled). Photos: Jason Quinlan, with permission of I. Hodder, Çatalhöyük research project.
This raises two key points with regard to value. Participants in burials may have included the day-to-day inhabitants of the building itself; genetic or practical kin of the deceased (likely not all resident in the same house); as well as the relations of other people buried there, whose bodies would sometimes be interacted with as new burials took place. When buildings accumulated burials, they may have accumulated significant numbers of stakeholders whose interests, opinions and projects intersected in those buildings.
However, not all parties involved were necessarily equal. For some burials, the evidence suggests an important role for people with knowledge of earlier burial locations. People who were involved in previous burials in a house would have been essential to successful grave reopening, the assembling of resonant artefact assemblages, or ‘rhyming’ body location and position. It is not just that, at Çatalhöyük, we see communities deeply invested in history-making and connection to the past (Hodder Citation2018). Burial was carried out in ways that actively accentuated differences among living persons, through their knowledge of past events in specific places. Although it is possible that recognised ‘ritual specialists’ or ‘elders’ derived status from such dynamics (Knüsel Citation2021), it is equally possible that this influence was informal, differentiating people de facto when subsequent ‘memory work’ was to occur. It may also have been only one among many de facto capacities that gave people potential influence in funerary practice. Nevertheless, given that the politics around burial at the time was potentially far-reaching and cross-cut other ways of grouping people (e.g. by place of residence, commensality or kinship), the ability to place successive burials may have given some people more influence than others in the dynamics of particular communities.
Temporality and building biographies
There are reasons to believe that burial accumulation had temporal limits. This is most evident when we examine funerary practice in the context of house biographies.
Kay (Citation2020b) has constructed fine-grained stratigraphic syntheses of Çatalhöyük houses, following the pioneering work of Taylor et al. (Citation2015). Taylor’s relative timeline method allows the detailed stratigraphic sequences of Çatalhöyük houses to be converted into a variety of time-series data, exceeding the precision of conventional architectural phasing. A key caveat is that the timelines reflect stratigraphic change – not real time – and must be read as a rough indication of the duration of burial sequences, rather than precise chronologies (see Kay Citation2020a, 459–60 for detailed discussion).
A clear temporal pattern emerges regarding burials in such biographies (). The biographies presented reflect all fully-excavated Early period buildings in the South excavation area, and most fully-excavated Middle period buildings in the North Area neighbourhood,Footnote3 giving the best available sample of variability in the respective periods. Few houses in either period had burial sequences throughout their entire occupation. In the Early period, most buildings contained one or a few burials, but even Building 17, the sole excavated burial ‘centre’, saw intervals of time (about 35% of occupation-phase stratigraphy) when it was not used for burial. In the mid-7th millennium, most buildings contained burials. But some had extensive occupation sequences before any interments, and others saw long occupation after the final burial. All indications suggest that these building biographies spanned a few decades (Cessford Citation2005; Matthews Citation2005). As a rough estimate, then, the buildings in question may have accumulated burial sequences for several years (up to perhaps two decades) despite being occupied for considerably longer. In short, it appears that buildings only temporarily took on ‘central’ roles in burying the dead.
Figure 3. Spans within the occupation of early period buildings during which burials were carried out. Underlying data available: Kay (Citation2020b).
Figure 4. Spans within the occupation of middle period buildings during which burials were carried out. Underlying data available: Kay (Citation2020b).
A finer-grained investigation accentuates this picture. The final burials in some Middle period buildings appear to be especially dramatically staged, as if putting a punctuation mark on the sequences. For example, in Building 52, two platforms contained burials. One accumulated bodies sequentially over considerable time. The second contained the elaborate final burial, a primary deposition of an adult alongside remains of at least six subadults in various states of completeness and articulation (Haddow et al. Citation2016). Shortly thereafter, the house was deliberately burnt, before the main room was refurbished and re-inhabited (Farid Citation2013, 51). In Building 77, the final burials in the house likely occurred simultaneously with (or shortly after) the addition of massive cattle-horn pillars and dramatic red painting surrounding the main burial platform (Kay Citation2020a).
Accumulations of burials in Çatalhöyük houses do appear to have begotten further burials – to an extent. Across the Early and Middle periods, buildings with occupation-phase burials tended to be used repeatedly. And funerary practice often involved physically re-opening graves to relate new inhumations to previous ones, or else ‘citing’ invisible, unopened graves through treatment, positioning or objects. All of this suggests that people with specific knowledge and experiences may have been able to take on particularly influential roles when burials were directed into spaces they knew well. However, buildings that accumulated burials did so for a limited time. Investigating these dynamics of accumulation may help to produce richer understandings of social inequality.
Three unequal pasts at Çatalhöyük
Here we sketch three possible pasts that might underlie our data, situating inequality more deeply in specifically Çatalhöyük practices. Although these are imaginative reconstructions, each illustrates ways that accumulating burials may have enchained futures and produced certain kinds of social person among the living.
Burial specialists were people, not households
It is possible that the reasons for burying a person in a particular house were less to do with that person’s relationship with the house, than with a particular person/group. Perhaps the tendency for burials to accumulate for a limited time in house biographies reflects the coming and going of key individuals who were able to centre the building in funerary practices. As individuals/groups attained/lost status as influential figures, almost every house eventually became ‘centred’ (in funerary terms) at some point.
In this context it is worth revisiting the idea that elders were especially important in Çatalhöyük communities, and may have had especially important roles in ‘history-making’ practices (Pearson and Meskell Citation2015). Becoming an elder, by definition, takes time, and elders (if they are literally elderly) may not live much longer once they have attained the status. In the short term, houses closely associated with specific elders may therefore have rapidly accumulated burials and other history-oriented activities, but favoured burial locations may have shifted over time as some elders died and other people attained elder status. Other forms of distinctive personal influence, such as that held by sickly or differently-able people in many societies (Knüsel Citation2021), could also have been at play. In any of these cases, the sum result in architectural terms of increasing interpersonal inequality would not be concentration of burials in a few houses, but burials distributed among most houses (with a certain degree of unevenness).
Burials were to some extent used as a levelling mechanism
It is also possible that the tendency for almost all houses to experience temporary funerary ‘centrality’ was deliberate. The mid-7th millennium saw people increasingly differentiated from one another in terms of skills they developed and the material culture that accumulated around them. This may have been an unwelcome development in a society that strongly valued sharing, giving, and equality, as has been suggested for Neolithic southwest Asia from the Epipalaeolithic into the Neolithic (Baird, Fairbairn, and Martin Citation2017; Kuijt Citation2000; Twiss Citation2008). At Çatalhöyük desire for parity may have encouraged efforts to ensure that houses were roughly similar. At pivotal moments for the construction/expression of relationships, the importance of each building (and people associated with it) may have been asserted by burying bodies and artefacts there. Dramatic events at the end of significant burial sequences may indeed reflect conscious efforts to nip potential inequality in the bud, declaring the ‘completion’ of one house’s role in burial and relocating future burial activity elsewhere. If so, burial would have been one among many practices that worked to qualitatively homogenise houses in appearance and function (Mazzucato et al. Citation2022), even as quantitative differences threatened to grow (Twiss et al. Citationunder revision). Although this interpretation strengthens the idea of houses as history-making institutions, as per the ‘history house’ or ‘house society’ hypothesis, it challenges the assumption that such institutions continually competed to accumulate the most meaningful histories (contra Hodder and Pels Citation2010), instead suggesting less linear dynamics.
Centrality in burial practice was an unsustainable status
Lastly, inhabiting a house with a ‘rich’ history of burial may have undermined inhabitants’ autonomy in other domains of life, enchaining time-limited forms of influence. If large communities coalesced around burials, each sequential burial could have created additional stakeholders in future decisions around a house. Living in the house might have become an increasingly challenging process of negotiation among interested parties.
In this context, it is perhaps salient that buildings with many burials often have particularly chaotic biographies in other ways. Building 17 in the Early period had one, two, or three discrete ‘kitchen’ areas (with ovens and/or hearths) at various points (Kay Citation2020b, 221–227). Several Middle period houses with many burials (such as Buildings 1 and 52) saw their living space dramatically refashioned during their occupations, with rooms added, partitioned, and refurnished. Although all Çatalhöyük houses were flexible in form and function, these more heavily buried-in structures often appear especially dynamic (cf. Kay Citation2020b). The impression is not of especially autonomous ‘elite households’, but of buildings endlessly reconfigured to suit divergent needs.
Perhaps, as Çatalhöyük grew denser and more populous, it became increasingly challenging to maintain socially central places. If burial ‘centrality’ worked less like capitalist accumulations and more like a ‘big man’ economy, it may have come at a high price: inviting people from various social groups to become stakeholders in a space, until managing conflicting obligations and expectations became unfeasible. If so, we might expect to see accumulations of prestigious action (e.g. burial, painting, sculpture) – and some degree of correlation between these accumulations (Schotsmans et al. Citation2022) – yet also expect accumulation to naturally slow down or end after a certain point.
Conclusion
This exploration of possible pasts implicates a richer range of social patterns than the property paradigm can accommodate. Looking for inequality in practice encourages questioning of the too-easy use of architecture as a proxy for social units. Instead, it leads to engagement with the fluidity of households: how they may have changed as key individuals died or new ones were born; how the social salience of buildings was actively transformed; above all the fact that households never existed in isolation and may not have been clearly defined at all. A focus on the value of action draws us away from generic ‘wealth’ or ‘power’. Rather we seek to understand how burial as a specific practice created situated differences between people. Moments like the deposit of harvests in indoor storerooms and the construction of dwellings likely spawned other differentials of power and potential, which likely intersected with the ones discussed here but were surely not reducible to a single spectrum of inequality. And because value is linked to the production of futures, we are encouraged to think laterally about the past futures that burial may have sought to bring about. It is not obvious that accumulating bodies (or pots, grain bins, or stone tools) would have made it easier to further concentrate such practices in subsequent months, years, or decades.
None of this means that the tools of contemporary inequality discourse are superfluous. The inequalities discussed here do not closely resemble those of modern capitalism, but this does not mean that using modern economic tools to investigate them was misguided. Rather, combined with a contextual approach to value, past futures and the contingency of actions, the observed inequalities have enriched understanding of inequality in a distinctively Neolithic society.
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.
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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.
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.
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