F.D. Flam: What archaeology can teach us about extreme inequality

Today’s state of extreme economic inequality is a problem best approached with science — using it to make specific measurements, identify root causes, and develop workable solutions. Archaeology is revealing a broad picture that spans thousands of years of prehistory, challenging some of the pervasive biases about the inevitability of inequality as people form larger communities or advance technologically.

In a vast region of central Europe, farming communities defied expectations by living in houses that were all roughly the same size, leaving no trace of palaces, kings or other nobility — and they did so for five millennia. When future archaeologists study the 21st century, they’ll find the opposite. According to recent global data, the bottom 40% of the population on the economic ladder possesses just 0.6% of the world’s wealth.

“We're in probably the greatest [period of] inequality our species has ever seen, and so the natural question for many of us arises, ‘how did we get here?’” said archaeologist Paul Duffy of Kiel University in Germany.

The findings he and his colleagues are unearthing challenge the common assumption that inequality was the unavoidable price of human development as we progressed from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, and eventually to an industrial society.

This latest evidence suggests we don’t have to accept worsening inequality as we move from an industrial to an information economy and on to whatever artificial intelligence ushers in next.

Understanding the past in this way wasn’t possible without new scientific tools such as ancient DNA and chemical analysis of skeletons and teeth, which reveal diet, movement patterns and other intricate details of the lives of ordinary people.

Duffy was the lead author of a study published in August in Science Advances, which examined a surprisingly egalitarian society in Eastern Europe — the Carpathian Basin, which encompasses what’s now Hungary along with parts of Austria, Serbia and Ukraine. The researchers found evidence of persistent equality in the way communities were structured and in the goods buried with their dead.

The team applied a standard measure of economic inequality known as the Gini coefficient — a scale that ranges from perfect equality at 0 to one person or family hoarding everything at 1. The World Bank recently scored the US at 0.42, while more egalitarian countries such as the Netherlands and Iceland scored around 0.25. The people of the Carpathian Basin scored an even more egalitarian 0.21, sustained through various millennia and technological changes.

Earlier studies documented a much higher coefficient once the early farmers of Eurasia developed the plow and used draft animals to till their fields. Equality generally depends on an abundance of land and a shortage of labor, and in other parts of Europe and the Near East, plowing with draft animals fostered inequality by creating an artificial land scarcity since it took about twice the land to produce the same crop yield. It also reduced the need for labor.

But in this region, Duffy said, fertile land was so abundant that people could escape if a class of elites formed and became greedy or despotic. Every society has leaders, he said, but if people can vote with their feet, leaders are forced to act in the interest of the group. “It’s really important to be able to go somewhere.”

However, this area maintained what Duffy calls a stateless society. There were no pyramids to honor rulers but instead there were public works, such as a series of ditches. People came together and got things done.

Archaeologist Gary Feinman of the Field Museum in Chicago, said researchers are now able to trace the way people moved around through DNA obtained from skeletal remains. They can also use strontium isotopes — different forms of the chemical element strontium — which differ by region and are absorbed by the body through food and water. Depending on the ratio of the isotopes and where they’re found — teeth or bones — researchers can determine where someone was born and whether they moved around.

Feinman said he was struck by the contrast he found in Mexico between the more egalitarian society of pre-Columbian Oaxaca and the hierarchical Mayan empire, which collapsed before Europeans arrived. Extreme inequality becomes unstable because it destroys social cohesion. “People will cooperate as long as they see their needs and aims are aligned with those of the larger group,” he said. When people are out of alignment with the group, things break down.

In a sweeping study published last spring, Feinman and his colleagues also connected equality to the specific sources of material wealth. The most egalitarian societies depend on human labor for their wealth — on the work of farmers, or artisans or builders, for example. If resources have to be drawn from a wide segment of the citizenry, Feinman said, societies tend to develop more collective forms of government.

Wealth tends to become concentrated when most of it comes from resources that can be controlled by a few people — oil, for example, or perhaps data and real estate today.

These scientific archaeological studies are helping dismantle assumptions about human progress. People don’t necessarily need hierarchy or authoritarian leadership, or even farming to achieve things, Feinman said. Sometimes hunter-gatherer societies built monuments — in Turkey and in North America. And even if they moved around, they gathered periodically at those monuments in festivals that might have resembled today’s Burning Man.

There’s an even more pervasive assumption that life was progressively worse for the average person the farther back we look in history because they lacked technology — from basic farming and building materials to indoor plumbing, TV and smartphones. How did they get by? That all depended on the era, the place, and whether they lived in a harmonious or oppressive society.

Today’s inequality could easily grow as rapidly changing technology pushes people off their career paths. And then we’ll argue over whether those on the losing end deserve help, and what’s fair.

In the long-term view, societies don’t collapse because they’re too fair, too equitable, too cooperative, or too caring. Helping the less fortunate through upheaval builds cohesion and strengthens our chances for survival in the long run.

____

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.