Rich Man, Poor Man (Wayne Curtis, 2018)

In this Editor's Introduction to this Special Contribution, I explore some central issues surrounding the archaeology of poverty and ponder why it has taken historical archaeologists so long to "discover" poverty as a research topic.

M. Panahi ed. Ottoman Corinthia, Athens, 2016

With a few exceptions, Classical archaeologists and historians have not served the post-Roman periods of Greece particularly well. For obvious reasons, they were attracted to the monuments, material culture and history of an era when the poleis of Greece were centres of learning where the arts flourished. When reading about ancient Greece, we should not lose sight of the fact that what scholars have selected to present are the deeds and material culture of a very small portion of society. This minority, the rich, are well represented in the surviving literature and in our studies of the past but the vast majority of the ancient population are practically invisible and should not be ignored. In fact, if we are to be responsible social historians, then we must do our utmost to understand the archaeology of poverty. Accessing data relevant to those living close to subsistence is not easy and requires us to read outside our particular areas of specialty. It is not enough for a prehistorian or classicist to know the primary and secondary literature thoroughly. As John Nandris and Harriet Blitzer both know, a true understanding of our subject can only be obtained by a close study of ethnographic data and from periods that are better documented than our own. 1 The Byzantine sources are relatively rich but also tend to deal with the great and the good. Many monastic records that deal with ordinary people, for instance, tend to document the property held by paroikoi. 2 We think of this echelon as peasants but it is clear from the size of their holdings that there were nameless others who did the day to day chores. The paroikoi seem to be more yeomen farmers with an income of, say, three to four times subsistence level. The unnamed are those who live at subsistence.

2018

Most a-cephalic societies identified by anthropology are described as being poor in absolute (material) terms, but rich in time for leisure or other activities. Affluence is generally understood as a situation where material needs remain limited and where the idea of necessity governs economic production. In this stoic understanding of human existence, social equality is inevitably linked to limited economic wealth and, hence, to hunter-gatherer societies. According to this logic, the development of individual needs not only requires a greater input of labour, but also leads to social inequality, political institutions, etc. This dominant civilisational narrative is being challenged by archaeology, as increasing evidence is provided of prehistoric societies with an exceptional demographic and economic development, including a high level of specialisation and coordination, but where no or few signs of political centralisation can be identified. These societies engaged in substantial joint enterprises, extended over large territories, organised large-scale distribution networks, and developed exceptional technical skills. No convincing interpretative framework has yet been developed for these archaeological complexes, which evade the conventional labels of chiefdom, state, social complexity, etc. The various spatial and material expressions used in archaeology to identify political institutions, centralised power, or social hierarchies remain elusive in these cases. Although settlement areas may have reached considerable sizes, they did not develop into urban centres. The production of substantial surplus is the common feature of these groups. This production was utilised in very different social, ideological, or political realms, but was not transformed into private property. Consequently, we can speak here of cooperative affluent societies, where substantial material benefits were shared and enjoyed collectively. In our presentation, examples of several archaeological case studies, ranging from the Near East to the western Mediterranean, will be used to discuss the strategies adopted by these societies in relation to surplus production and obliteration, as well as their political forms. Ultimately, this will also allow us to understand why it proves difficult to find equivalences in the ethnographic record.

World Archaeology, 2023

Archaeology lends a critical perspective to research on social inequality due to the eld's unique access to deep history, emphasis on materiality, and explicit incorporation of multiple lines of evidence. This paper o ers a concise overview of archaeological approaches aimed at students and scholars in other elds. We develop a categorization of disciplinary strategies, arguing that archaeologists address institutionalized inequality through examining inequalities in the accumulation of goods or resources (economic di erentiation); access to resources or knowledge (social di erentiation), and inequalities in action, the ability to make decisions for oneself or others (political di erentiation). 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 exibility and utility of archaeological methods for answering questions about inequality in human societies.

Poverty in Late Bronze Age China: Its Archaeological Dimensions, 2020

Poverty and Inequality in Early Civilizations: Introduction The fourth volume of the series "Studien zur Wirtschaftsarchäologie" presents the proceedings of the conference "Poverty in Early Civilizations: a Comparative View", held at the University of Cologne on 17 and 18 November 2017. The conference was organized on behalf of the Research Training Group 1878 "Archaeology of pre-modern economies", funded by the German Research Council and hosted jointly by the University of Cologne and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn. The proceedings include papers, given at the conference, and a few additional contributions by other authors. The speakers and the titles of their talks are listed below in the order, in which the papers were delivered during the conference. We would like to thank all speakers and authors for their contribution to this volume and to the stimulating discussions during the conference. We are also grateful to the German Research Council (DFG), the Competence Area IV of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Cologne and the Franz-und-Eva-Rutzen-Stiftung for their financial support of the conference and of the publication of this volume. Many thanks also go to Dr Caitlin Chaves Yate for improving the English wording of contributions by authors whose first language is not English. Pia Evening has kindly helped establising formal consistency across the papers.

In 1754, the Academy of Dijon sponsored a contest for the best examination of the origins of human inequality. Although not the winning entry, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins and Basis of Inequality among Men remains the most widely read and influential submission. This article uses archaeological data unavailable in the eighteenth century to address Rousseau's questions anew-questions still of critical importance. Are humans naturally prone to extreme economic inequality? If not, when, how, and why did such inequality arise? And, did drastic imbalances in wealth benefit all members of early societies or only a few? ________________________________________________________________ Résumé: En 1754, l'académie de Dijon avait parrainé le concours du meilleur examen de l'origine de l'inégalité humaine. Bien qu'il n'en fû t pas le gagnant, le Discours de Rousseau sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes reste la présentation la plus lue et la plus influente. Cet article utilise les données archéologiques indisponibles au XVIIIe siècle pour traiter à nouveau des questions de Rousseau, questions qui sont toujours d'une importance cruciale. Les humains sont-ils naturellement exposés à une inégalité économique extrême ? Si non, quand, comment et pourquoi ces inégalités sont-elles apparues ? Et de forts déséquilibres de richesses bénéficiaient-ils à tous les membres des sociétés anciennes ou à quelques-uns seulement ? ________________________________________________________________ Resumen: En 1754, la Academia de Dijon patrocinó un certamen sobre el mejor análisis de los orígenes de la desigualdad humana. Aunque no fue ganador, el Discurso sobre el origen de la desigualdad entre los hombres, de Rousseau, sigue siendo el documento más influyente y más leído. El presente artículo utiliza datos arqueoló gicos no disponibles en el siglo XVIII para abordar las preguntas de Rousseau, de nuevo -preguntas que siguen siendo de importancia crítica. ¿Somos los humanos propensos de manera natural a una desigualdad econó mica extrema? Si no es así, ¿cuándo, có mo, RESEARCH ARCHAEOLOGIES

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 1987

This paper deals with the problem of measuring household wealth from domestic artifactual remains. After an archaeologically useful definition and classitication of wealth is presented, quantitative anthropological, sociological, and historical analyses demonstrating a strong association between household possessions and wealth are reviewed. Then, ethnographic and historical data on different functional categories of household goods are examined in order to assess their relative ability to predict wealth. Once the nature of the relationship between household possessions and wealth in the systemic context is specified, methodological problems influencing the detection of this relationship in the archaeological context are treated. It is concluded that household possessions are quite good wealth indicators in the systemic context, and that proper attention to a number of methodological issues allows archaeologists to take advantage of this relationship to measure household wealth in past societies. Q