Assessing Classic Maya multi-scalar household inequality in southern Belize

Abstract

Inequality is present to varying degrees in all human societies, pre-modern and contemporary. For archaeological contexts, variation in house size reflects differences in labor investments and serves as a robust means to assess wealth across populations small and large. The Gini coefficient, which measures the degree of concentration in the distribution of units within a population, has been employed as a standardized metric to evaluate the extent of inequality. Here, we employ Gini coefficients to assess wealth inequality at four nested socio-spatial scales–the micro-region, the polity, the district, and the neighborhood–at two medium size, peripheral Classic Maya polities located in southern Belize. We then compare our findings to Gini coefficients for other Classic Maya polities in the Maya heartland and to contemporaneous polities across Mesoamerica. We see the patterning of wealth inequality across the polities as a consequence of variable access to networks of exchange. Different forms of governance played a role in the degree of wealth inequality in Mesoamerica. More autocratic Classic Maya polities, where principals exercised degrees of control over exclusionary exchange networks, maintained high degrees of wealth inequality compared to most other Mesoamerican states, which generally are characterized by more collective forms of governance. We examine how household wealth inequality was reproduced at peripheral Classic Maya polities, and illustrate that economic inequity trickled down to local socio-spatial units in this prehispanic context.

Ancient Lowland Maya neighborhoods: Average Nearest Neighbor analysis and kernel density models, environments, and urban scale

“…Medium centers have varying degrees of nucleation, with some exhibiting dense settlement near their civic ceremonial cores (e.g., Baking Pot, Pacbitun) and others following a low-density urbanism plan [ sensu 102 ], where smaller households surround larger households thought to be the homes of intermediate elites at Lower Dover [ 76 ] and Uxbenká [ 75 , 78 ]. The trends in the smallest settlements in our sample are harder to distinguish in part due to their small populations and small sample size.…”

“…Within our dataset, centers are located across a variety of environments including upland regions (e.g., Ix Kuku’il), alluvial valleys (e.g., Copán), the edges of escarpments (e.g., El Perú-Waka’), and flat shrublands (e.g., Chunchucmil). Centers ranged from densely occupied cities with nearly 900 structures/km 2 , as in El Perú-Waka’s central core [ 172 : Table 5.2, 173 ], to low-density landscapes with 15 structures/km 2 , as at Ix Kuku’il [ 78 : Table 3]. Notably, across the highest and lowest density settlements and those in-between, the average number of structures per household / residential group is between 3 and 4 (see S1 Text in S1 File ).…”

“…For example, at Copan, Tikal, Aguateca, Lower Dover, Uxbenká, and Ix Kuku’il, Classic Maya neighborhoods were composed of houses of varying sizes, often with a larger household (the neighborhood seat or high-status commoner [hsc] household) surrounded by smaller households [ 40 Table 1, 72 – 76 , see also 77 ]. We interpret neighborhood seats as local centers of power, acting as patrons to their surrounding community and mediators to higher-level authorities such as district seats and above [ 78 ]. This is visible in the settlement patterns at these centers with most neighborhoods containing a visibly larger household.…”

“…In such clusters, one patio-group, usually in a central location in the cluster, is larger than the others and has one mound or building that is more imposing than any of the others in that patio-group or the cluster”. Smaller households center around a single high-status household in some instances [ 72 , 75 , 76 , 78 ], but not in others [ 79 ]. Following ME Smith [ 37 ], we interpret these entities as probable neighborhoods and see them as comparable in scale and extent to the units referred to as clusters by Ashmore [ 64 ] and Bullard [ 20 ].…”

Archaeological landscape, settlement dynamics, and sociopolitical organization in the Chactún area of the central Maya Lowlands

“…Among several methods that can been used to assess the extent of economic and social inequality, by measuring the distribution of wealth among segments of a particular population, the Gini index has often been applied in archaeology, by using material proxies such as grave goods, artifact distributions and, most typically, household sizes expressed as areas or volumes [63][64][65][66]. However, given the scope of our research and the nature of the data we have been able to collect, we consider that none of these approaches would lead to meaningful results, not even the method based on the sizes of residential units.…”