Materialising inequalities in past, present and future

Inequalities in human existence and experience are deeply pervasive in the modern world in relation to food security, economic wealth and basic human needs, from safety and shelter, to adequate healthcare. Global organisations call for recognition that the world is facing an ‘inequality crisis’.¹ As climatic crises intensify, with the added strains of warfare and conflict, pressures on populations are creating instability, forced displacement and food shortages. In the face of such catastrophic evidence of ongoing disparities of existence, what can the past offer, or tell us, that can be of use? How can archaeology contribute to addressing inequity in local to global terms?

Three decades ago, Randall H. McGuire and Robert Paynter published An Archaeology of Inequality (1991), a volume that captured a new genre of research that considered how archaeology could contribute to an understanding of power relations and challenges to social power in the past, with a focus on the historical archaeology of the United States. Since the early 1990s, archaeological research in the field has burgeoned, especially within historical archaeology where Marxism has proved ‘a rich source of insights, theories, concepts and ideas about the nature of cultural change’ (McGuire 2015, 123). Bringing visibility to those historically marginalised has been at the forefront, with significant attention given to materially documenting the lives of enslaved communities and individuals that shaped freedom by their own means (e.g. Marshall 2014; Singleton 1999), or the human experience of homelessness (Zimmerman 2010). Concentrated work on ‘small finds’ more broadly has led to significant advances on understanding less documented social worlds of women and children through objects, clothing and embodiment and cultural biographies of objects and individuals (Cochran and Beaudry 2015, 199–200; Gilchrist 2012; Nowell 2021). Emphasis on everyday life and comparing the domestic with the larger world have exposed some of the mechanisms of capitalism and resource extraction that underpin much of today’s inequitable economic and social landscapes (Johnson 1996; Paynter 1988; see overview in McGuire 2015). Aided by significant advancements in bioarchaeological understanding of human lives and experiences, we can also now chart, from infancy to old age, the deprivations of starvation, abuse and child and adult labour (e.g. Gowland et al. 2023).

A significant density of work has also explored evidence in prehistory for egalitarian and non-egalitarian societies, and the role of resource intensification and particularly agriculture in creating a perceived seismic shift in the ability of groups to produce surplus, and thereby support larger populations, resulting in increased complexity and emergent inequality (see critique by Price and Feinmann 1995, 3–11). In Robert Osbourne’s words, a primary issue in these developing debates, however, is that archaeologists ‘set the bar for an egalitarian society extremely high…’, questioning what societies can really achieve without large populations, centralised direction and leadership (2007, 145). Entwined are questions about inequality in the deep past, about its origins, pervasiveness and variability (Smith, Kohler, and Feinman 2018). Historical archaeology has enriched and quantified explorations of inequality through integrated study of material culture and text, whereas in prehistory the co-option and development of empirical methods for measuring inequality have dominated the last decade, predominantly the use of the Gini coefficient (see Kohler and Smith 2018).

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent publication – The Dawn of Everything – acknowledges this ‘boom’ of thinking around inequality (2022, 1–26, 7) and explores the challenge of stepping outside of linear notions of production and surplus as drivers for increased complexity, population density and inequality. Graeber and Wengrow encourage us to rethink deeply ingrained ideas of inequality being an inevitability of the human condition, technological ‘advancement’ and population growth. They argue that equitable and inequitable models for societal organisation can be traced back to the Palaeolithic, pulsing in and out of the longue durée across millennia. Early societies were capable of imposing authority and enacting extreme violence, but they were also enormously creative in developing processes of consensus and models of societal organisation that were inclusive, responsible and regulating. In short, their message is that in global perspective there is no single simple linear progression from a time of prehistoric egalitarianism to the gross inequities and ranked systems of the capitalist world today. The optimism of Graeber and Wengrow’s provocative work is refreshing at a time when a global descent into extremes of social, health and economic inequity seems unstoppable. In the three decades that divide An Archaeology of Inequality and The Dawn of Everything, global inequity has soared. In 2014, almost half the world’s wealth was owned by just 1% of the population and seven out of 10 people lived in countries where economic inequality had increased in the preceding three decades.² 10 years later, Oxfam claims some 1 in 10 people worldwide are going hungry and that ‘extreme poverty is increasing for the first time in 25 years’.³ In Graeber and Wengrow’s ‘more hopeful story’ about the human past, archaeology and anthropology provide multi-scalar evidence for tempos of experimentation and rejection, resistance and creativity, in how people coalesce and operate together within social groupings from seasonal camps to cities.

It is these past and current contexts that situate a fresh consideration of archaeology of inequality in this special issue, with contributors invited to not only ask how we can explore the archaeological record for robust indications of inequality but also challenge and deconstruct narratives of inequality in the past and actively address inequalities in the present. The authors respond by critiquing methods for measuring inequality and propose new models for exploring in/equity. They ask readers to reflect on terminologies and create more inclusive archaeologies that recognise multi-vocality in past and present. The papers here are rich in case-studies that reveal not only how materiality might be suggestive of inequity but also the ways in which evidence can suggest processes of moderation and cooperation. The authors also point to how recognising the material traces of unequal treatment or access can allow new and different voices to join the narrative of the human past.

Rebalancing perspectives

Contributions in this issue, in quite separate ways, touch upon the growth of realisation that archaeology as a discipline has tended to valorise only particular voices and ideas. It is well recognised now that archaeology developed in western societies in the mid-19^th century, connected to, and an expression of, the rise of a European middle class (Daniel 1981, 212; McGuire and Walker 1999, 162; Trigger 1989, 14). In recent decades we have become far more historiographically nuanced and aware of our disciplinary and personal biases, from western eurocentrism in research models, to a need for greater global inclusion (e.g. Meskell 2009). Archaeologists have already critiqued the narrow focus on elites, kings and hierarchies and significant advances continue in gendered approaches to understanding the past (Gilchrist 1999; Weismantel 2022). Increasingly, archaeology is rightly seeking to express the whole of human experience and, at the same time, is becoming proactively reflective on the ways in which structural inequalities are embedded in our discipline and impact on knowledge production and narratives.

Deconstructing ableist views of the past, however, is a work in progress, powerfully explored by Vogel (2023) in this volume in a careful consideration of studies of bodily differences and disabilities in the fields of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology. The author interrogates the variable nature of how disability has been, and can be, understood in this field, revealing the early tendencies for cataloguing and identifying disease in medicalised terms with embedded assumptions that these defined physiological and bodily differences. Discussions of disability in terms of treatment, care and therapy are recent developments. Southwell, Gowland, and Powell (2016) in particular highlight the universal importance of care in past human relationships, dispelling simplistic notions of othering and discrimination and underlining the complexity of responses – positive and negative – to disease and impairment in the past. Vogel, in relation to Egyptian studies, calls for a rejection of a dehumanising medicalised language, and a new focus on rethinking the disability paradigm, with consideration of the cultural variability in perceptions and the agency of those with disabilities and bodily differences. In doing so, we can move away from ableist interpretations but also empower the voices of those who directly experienced impairment, disease and bodily difference in the past. In different ways, the case studies from contemporary archaeology presented in this volume by Hattori (2023) and Dezhamkhooy (2023), also use archaeology to document the lives and deaths of individuals denied permanence, safety and an identity in the modern world. For example, Hattori’s archaeological and forensic exploration uncovers evidence of the structural erasure of the identity of the disenfranchised poor in Brazil through the state sponsorship of mass cremations. The study poses powerful questions about individual rights to care at death, commemoration and remembrance (Hattori 2023).

The last three decades have also witnessed constructive reflections on how social and economic inequalities shape archaeological knowledge production. This is exemplified in this edition by White (2023) who reveals the seminal but unrecognised contribution of the male labouring classes in London in the discovery of the Palaeolithic floor, and how aspirant middle-class collectors and scholarly societies were culpable in the exploitation of these workers. This adds to a growing body of scholarship exploring the largely unacknowledged but massive contribution of labourers and workers in the foundational knowledge production and fieldwork of the 19^th and 20^th centuries (Mickel 2019, 181–205). These authors confront class and make class relations and class consciousness integral to archaeology. McGuire and Walker (1999, 159) also show how we can promote epistemic diversity, ethical approaches and inclusivity in community participation in fieldwork and knowledge production. Archaeologists should thus work to co-produce with groups and communities that have been historically disenfranchised and marginalised (see Atalay 2012; Atalay et al. 2014; Battle-Baptiste 2011).

Modelling inequalities

Alongside this changing social awareness in the discipline in recent years, archaeology has also adapted quantitative approaches of economists and sociologists in measuring inequality. The use of the Gini coefficient is now widespread, providing a new and powerful way of measuring inequality in a comparative way (Smith, Kohler, and Feinman 2018, 14–15). Any broad application of Gini coefficients, however, needs to be undertaken with care. If comparing house sizes, for example, across time and space (e.g. Bogaard et al. 2019), it is necessary to recognise that this involves radically different kinds of architectures and their functions, from round-houses to palaces. However, such macro-level studies are realising valuable insights, such as identifying correspondences between high levels of violence towards the end of intense periods of inequality (Kohler et al. 2018, 313). Another caveat is recognition that value and material accumulation can take varied forms (Kay et al. 2023 in this volume). Value is not just about measurable property, it can implicate behaviour, action and investment in activities and people (Ibid.). As Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate, there are numerous alternatives to capitalist practices, including societies where wealth sharing or redistribution are essential leadership attributes for example, in ‘big man’ societies. Other cultures are characterized by abstinence from material wealth or traditions in which property and ownership change seasonally (2022, 107).

In this volume, two contributions make use of Gini coefficients. Simelius (2023), following the broader preponderance of research in archaeology (Kohler et al. 2018: Figure 1.2) investigates house size in the ancient city of Pompeii. While recognising that buildings may not be as simple as ‘stand-ins for human beings’ (Kay et al. 2023), Simelius integrates additional epigraphic evidence, revealing high inequality values in house sizes in this ancient city and arguing for extreme disparities in wealth, with elite families or individuals owning or occupying ‘at least 40–50% of all private architecture’. Kay and co-authors, discuss Neolithic Çatalhöyük and the evidence for accumulation and dispersion of bodies between houses. They initially employed Gini coefficients to assess domain-specific inequalities based on artefacts, animal remains, botanical residues, building sizes, display elements and burials. The results were broadly indicative of rising social complexity in the early to mid-7^th millennium. However, the authors focus on the different trend produced by funerary practice, which shows a contrasting slight decline in inequality over time across households (Kay et al. 2023). These results contrast with long-held notions that the burials in houses in this Neolithic settlement were a way that houses and associated people became powerful (e.g. Hodder and Pels 2010). The authors argue that buildings and households in fact only temporarily took on ‘central’ roles in burying the dead, perhaps in a conscious process allowing households to share in the accumulation of meaningful histories through burial. Accruing the dead may also have created unstable and unsustainable structures as more stakeholders became household participants. In this way, Kay reflects the broader archaeological recognition that ‘currencies of stratification’ need not solely be distributive and wealth based (see Pettitt 2020).

In seeking to create modes of measurement for these richer social patterns or currencies, Beck and Quinn mobilize archaeology’s unique take on materiality and multiple kinds of evidence in deep history to argue for its flexibility and utility for exploring inequality. Building on the recognition that wealth can be ‘material, relational and embodied’ (Bowles, Smith, and Borgerhoff Mulder 2010, 9), the authors argue how archaeologists and their data can triangulate between three entangled domains – access, accumulation and action – charting the complexities of inequality. They critique existing measuring systems for inequality, pointing to the ways in which accumulation can be embodied in diet, for example, and access can be about acquiring knowledge and technology, as much as material wealth or exotic goods. Action is argued as a third domain in which inequality can manifest materially, through control of labour and monument building or production, or through bioarchaeological evidence of trauma, enslavement or oppression.

Materalising institutional flexibilities

The material record can also manifest evidence for quite different societal structures which reject notions of inequality and involve regulatory mechanisms to manage potential elite dominance and control. Matthew Sanger (2023) in this volume explores evidence for group-based monument building at Poverty Point in the US as a form of collective action, arguing that seasonal gatherings ~ 3600–100 years BP may have operated as a conscious moderator of vertical structures and elite dominance. Sanger argues people oscillated between a seasonal cycle which saw thousands come together from a diverse constellation of local groups to build long-lasting and highly visible architectures before dispersing back to less monumental and more mobile hunter-gatherer strategies. Sanger suggests a calendar in which secular or religious authority could manifest in an organisational capacity, but just for a time, while building, feasting and ceremonies created strong bonds that regulated aspirant power. Graeber and Wengrow term this ‘institutional flexibility’, and draw together a diverse set of examples, showing the ways in which societies can engage in seasonal cycles of activity that see groups with little evidence of hierarchical structures amass in large numbers at certain times of year and during this time, elite figures and authorities manifest but disperse once the event is over (2022, 98–111). Mauss’ observations on Eskimo societies, featured by Graeber and Wengrow (2022, 107–8) and reviewed by Paul Pettitt in a discussion of variable social complexity in the Palaeolithic (2020, 204), are significant here in evidencing a societal model with strict oppositions between summer and winter life, distinguished by dispersed activities and settlement in the summer and more nucleated settlement in winter, characterised by groupings of longhouses holding multiple families, sometimes united by a central communal structure – each season is governed by distinct laws and regulations (see Mauss 1950, 38, 72; Pettitt 2020, 204). Here, as in many social contexts in past and present, seasonal cycles and activities, act as powerful drivers for collective cohesion, codifying experiences through shared rituals that guided movement and behaviours (see discussion in Semple 2018, 1–5). Even temporary, short-term but regular collective activity can have powerful effects.

In parts of northern Europe, much later in time c. 300–1000 CE, practices of seasonal, temporary open-air meetings (assemblies or things), lasting days rather than months, operated as mechanisms for resolving disputes and maintaining justice, while also serving to increase a sense of cohesion and regulate elite/individual power (Semple et al. 2020, 277–284). Such cycles permeate the human past, with seasonal aggregations serving to temporarily create multi-level societies evident even in the Palaeolithic (Pettitt 2022, 110). In late Neolithic Europe Vander Linden argues for a relational system of involved partners, individuals and communities that balanced access to goods and materials, and thus wealth and power, and explicitly acknowledged equity (2007, 177–93). Recently attention to food production and security has proved fundamental to identifying broader waves of increased or decreasing inequality of access to food acquisition (Bogaard 2017, 3) but also revealed non-elite innovations and resistance to elite centralised or co-opted production using ‘relatively mobile regimes’ (Bogaard 2017, 4). Thus, just as Sanger (2023) shows in relation to Poverty Point, and Graeber and Wengrow articulate more broadly (2022, 111), power is not always top-down: there are indications in the archaeological record of striking, creative modes of human cooperation that involve people shifting back and forth between alternative social arrangements, in ways that resisted and regulated power and rejected vertical hierarchies.

The politics of studying inequality: new directions in world view

In the foreword to this issue Randall H. McGuire recalls the focus he and the late Robert Paynter placed on materialising evidence for resistance as well as domination, arguing that across time, individuals and groups have engaged in extractive practice, but others have resisted and circumvented it. The papers in this issue continue and build on those efforts, not only conducting archaeological research to expose evidence of inequality but also as a way of searching for evidence of alternative systems of cooperation, cohesion and resistance. All of the authors here expose a new understanding of the past, whether bringing visibility to the contribution of the working classes of London to the discovery of the Palaeolithic (White 2023) or demonstrating hitherto unseen evidence for regional variability in chiefly power strategies in Polynesia (Quintus 2023). Papers engage in the now tried and tested empirical methods for documenting inequalities, such as Gini coefficients (Kay 2003; Simelius 2003), some refer to and explore the contributions bioarchaeology can now make to understanding individual experiences of impairment, disease and inequalities in health (Beck and Quinn 2003; Vogel and Power 2023). Other contributors point to the less tangible ways in which inequality can manifest in human experience (Kay 2003).

Two papers in this issue, however, mobilize archaeological evidence to document the impacts of modern capitalist structures on the lives of ordinary people. Dezhamkhooy focuses on the garbage camps of Iran (2003) and shows how factors such as violence, poverty and transience have turned garbage into a livelihood for multitudes of Afghan migrants who now work with and live in waste encampments. She shows how archaeology can reveal hidden inequalities and deconstruct official political narratives (2023, 10–11). Hattori (2023), in contrast, exposes how the burials of the disenfranchised poor in modern Brazil, once protected in cemeteries, are now at the mercy of state-sponsored clearance making way for commercial development. Both authors see archaeology as tool for social justice, as ‘a public-engaged practice’ that can provide a critical voice in modern political dialogue (González-Ruibal, Alonso González, and Criado-Boado 2018, 513–4).

These articles provoke a reconsideration of the popularisation of object-oriented approaches in archaeology, which have encouraged archaeologists to reengage with the centrality of material culture in human experience and consider its agency in social relations. These approaches, which might be argued to fall within the broader interdisciplinary field of new materialism, have prompted responses that point to the risks of disengaging from the problems that shape contemporary social life (e.g. Van Dyke 2021). Sev Fowles (2016) suggests that objects might offer the perfect distraction for archaeologists unwilling to accept disciplinary changes in which communities are no longer willing to be objectified in processes of knowledge production. The work of Dezhamkhooy with undocumented Afghan migrants in Iran and Hattori’s research on the neoliberal necropolitics of Brazil re-center human experience, and particularly the human body, in archaeological research and demonstrate that archaeology’s relevance in the contemporary world is tied to the commitment of archaeologists to the people and communities with whom they work. The growing recognition among archaeologists that they too are political agents is perhaps one of the most significant developments in the last three decades, generating creative research that challenges the forces that shape experiences of inequality, but also by questioning the boundaries of disciplinary work (Coelho 2020).

Beck and Quinn (2023) argue here that archaeology has the power not just to document inequalities in past and present, but to challenge contemporary understandings of institutionalised inequality as an inevitability. In this way, the authors contributing to this special issue of World Archaeology take us another step towards making archaeology an active, powerful tool for social justice, able to rebalance, challenge and change conceptions of inequality in past and present. Yet, the processes by which we can make contributions towards a different, better future are not free from contradictions. The discipline continues to be shaped by unequal relations (e.g. Cobb and Croucher 2020; Kamash 2021). Some of these are examined in this issue. Most authors are based in Global North organisations and navigate a constellation of references that are primarily anglophone. We are also aware that this special issue represents a very small window into discussions that are currently happening around the world on the theme of inequality. These limitations reflect processes of knowledge production in which authors might afford overlooking discussions according to national borders, available resources and languages used in scholarly work, or different epistemic traditions. As archaeologists we have the chance to actively rebalance our discipline and realise new understandings of inequality in past and present, and in doing so contribute to a more interesting story about the human experience that can build positive change within and beyond our discipline now and in the future.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the authors who have contributed to this special issue of World Archaeology and Randy McGuire for his generous foreword. Our thanks also go to the reviewers for their helpful comments, especially Ed Swenson and Paul Pettitt, whose constructive comments have helped shape and strengthen this editorial. All views expressed, however, remain our own.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Semple

Sarah Semple is Professor in Archaeology at Durham University. Her research includes the landscapes, funerary archaeology and material culture of early medieval Britain and Northern Europe. She is the author of Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England (2019), a co-author of Negotiating the North: Meeting-Places in the Middle Ages in the North Sea Zone (2020) and a co-editor of A Cultural History of Objects in the Medieval Age (2021).

Rui Gomes Coelho

Rui Gomes Coelho is Assistant Professor in Historical Archaeology at Durham University. His research focuses on colonialism, decolonisation, conflict and resistance in Southern Europe and in the Atlantic World. Recent publications include ‘Heritage and the Visual Ecology of the Plantationocene’ in the volume Heritage Ecologies edited by Torgeir Rinke Bangstad and Þóra Pétursdóttir (2021) and ‘The Politics of Interpretation in Historical Archaeology’, which appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Historical Archaeology edited by Charles E. Orser Jr., Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Susan Lawrence, James Symonds and Andrés Zarankin (2020).

Notes

1. ‘Inequality Crisis’ Thwarting Least Developed Countries’ Economic Progress, Ability to Achieve Middle-Income Status, Speakers Stress as Doha Conference Continues | UN Press 6^th March 2023 5^th United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries

2. Oxfam Briefing Paper, 20 January 2014. Working for the Few. Political capture and economic inequality. Summary. Working for the Few: Political capture and economic inequality – Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, Nicholas Galasso – Google Books.

3. Richest 1% grab nearly twice as much new wealth as rest of the world put together | Oxfam GB. Press release 16^th January 2023. https://www.oxfam.org.uk/mc/ar8thi/