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Wealth inequality in the prehispanic northern US Southwest: from Malthus to Tyche

Kohler, Timothy A.; Bird, Darcy; Bocinsky, R. Kyle; Reese, Kelsey; Gillreath-Brown, Andrew D.

Wealth inequality in the prehispanic northern US Southwest: from Malthus to Tyche Thumbnail


Authors

Darcy Bird

R. Kyle Bocinsky

Kelsey Reese

Andrew D. Gillreath-Brown



Abstract

Persistent differences in wealth and power among prehispanic Pueblo societies are visible from the late AD 800s through the late 1200s, after which large portions of the northern US Southwest were depopulated. In this paper we measure these differences in wealth using Gini coefficients based on house size, and show that high Ginis (large wealth differences) are positively related to persistence in settlements and inversely related to an annual measure of the size of the unoccupied dry-farming niche. We argue that wealth inequality in this record is due first to processes inherent in village life which have internally different distributions of the most productive maize fields, exacerbated by the dynamics of systems of balanced reciprocity; and second to decreasing ability to escape village life owing to shrinking availability of unoccupied places within the maize dry-farming niche as villages get enmeshed in regional systems of tribute or taxation. We embed this analytical reconstruction in the model of an ‘Abrupt imposition of Malthusian equilibrium in a natural-fertility, agrarian society’ proposed by Puleston et al. (Puleston C, Tuljapurkar S, Winterhalder B. 2014 PLoS ONE 9, e87541 (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0087541)), but show that the transition to Malthusian dynamics in this area is not abrupt but extends over centuries

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.

Citation

Kohler, T. A., Bird, D., Bocinsky, R. K., Reese, K., & Gillreath-Brown, A. D. (2023). Wealth inequality in the prehispanic northern US Southwest: from Malthus to Tyche. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 378(1883), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0298

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 31, 2023
Online Publication Date Jun 26, 2023
Publication Date Aug 14, 2023
Deposit Date Jan 3, 2024
Publicly Available Date Jan 3, 2024
Journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Print ISSN 0962-8436
Electronic ISSN 1471-2970
Publisher The Royal Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 378
Issue 1883
DOI https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0298
Keywords General Agricultural and Biological Sciences; General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2078837

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