Housing inequality and settlement persistence are associated across the archaeological record

Abstract

Definitions of sustainability commonly stress both systemic continuity and equality over time. However, the degree to which these two sides of sustainability might be related has not been systematically investigated. Recent theoretical and methodological insights have provided archaeologists with new tools for investigating sustainability in premodern societies. Here, we use Gini coefficients on residence size measurements as an estimate of material inequality and information on the persistence of settlements as a measure of continuity. Persistence is derived from the length of time a settlement endured in a particular state, and we assume that higher levels of persistence indicate greater adaptive capacity and resilience. We articulate an approach which allows us to combine these proxies to investigate the relationship between these two sides of sustainability and apply this to a global dataset of settlements from the last 10,000 y. We find that persistence is weakly correlated with material inequality, rather than equality, overall. We also find that this relationship grows stronger as settlement systems increase in scale and is strongest for larger sites in larger systems. This pattern may be the result of both increased functional diversity at a site level and network effects whereby residents of larger settlements were able to claim a larger share of the surplus produced by the settlement system.