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Copyright of Ancient Mesoamerica is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ancient Mesoamerica is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ancient Mesoamerica is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ancient Mesoamerica is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ancient Mesoamerica is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ancient Mesoamerica is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

House size is often used as a tool to calculate wealth in ancient societies, and thus it is also a potential source for the study of inequality. The site of Pompeii, on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, was first inhabited about 800 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried it 79 CE. The city provides one of the largest data sets of private architecture in the Roman world, and it has been utilized to calculate the level of inequality in a Roman urban setting. Nonetheless, to understand the inequality of the entire society of the city, these calculations need to be developed. This article uses quantitative and statistical methods, such as Gini coefficients, Lorenz Curves, and also simpler graphs and their interpretation to advance establish methods for exploring inequality through house and building size. A method is proposed for identifying the top economic elite in this urban setting, and the article develops the calculation of inequality further, to encompass even individuals who did not own buildings. As a result, excavated Pompeii's top economic elite is estimated to have comprised 50 to 100 households, with a high level of inequality evident in this ancient city during its final phase, the year 79 CE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horses have had a singular impact on human societies. Beyond increasing interconnectivity and revolutionizing warfare, reconfigurations of human-horse relationships coincide with changes in sociopolitical formations. How this occurs is less well understood. This article proposes that relationships of equestrianism transform people and horses reciprocally, generating new possibilities for both species. Focusing here on human benefits, equestrianism affords differential and increased mobility, access, and experience for people, which translate horse power into human power. This has particular consequences for how political authority is negotiated. I use the tell societies of Bronze Age Hungary (ca. 2300/2200–1600/1500 BC) to model how horses were harnessed in resistance to centralized rule and social inequality as much as they were used to assert power. This interpretation challenges traditional grand narratives for the European Bronze Age, which see male elite warriors driving chariots, desirous of bronze, and instituting hierarchical, complex societies. Rather, ordinary women and men riding horses built these long-lived communities and were variously able to resist chiefly authority because of the power offered by horses. The theory starts disentangling mechanisms between local equestrianism and long-term historical changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow challenges traditional evolutionary theories of human history, arguing that early human societies were not confined to small, egalitarian bands and that agriculture did not lead to inequality. The article evaluates the book's arguments, discussing topics such as the organization of tribes, the presence of rich burials, the origins of agriculture, the construction of monuments, and the relationship between scale and hierarchy in ancient cities. It also explores the concepts of collapse and resilience in sociocultural evolution. While the book is original and thought-provoking, the article finds some disagreements with its arguments, noting that they rely more on rhetoric than logic. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, I discuss the economic system of the Classic Maya Lowlands secondary urban center of Uxul, Campeche. In particular, I aim to understand Uxul's economy by taking a household‐based approach, focusing on the distribution of artifacts and wealth in domestic contexts. I integrate a distributional approach with an analysis of wealth inequality using the Gini index, and insights from the field of modern economics into the mechanisms responsible for the observed economic patterns. This allows for the identification and characterization of market exchange in a case study where physical marketplaces have not yet been identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviving interest in Jack Goody's comparative and historical work on systems of production, kinship and state organization prompts us to revisit his analysis in 'Production and Reproduction' – looking both at the data and at the explanatory framework. While we accept Goody's emphasis on the central importance of productive technology, we nevertheless contend that he underplays the role of kinship and marriage systems in fostering agricultural production, the growth of state power and inequality. We argue that this oversight results from Goody's 'resolute materialism' and that a more realistic view requires a more systematic formulation of the interactions between pragmatic rationality and the logic of social identity and cohesion. We develop an alternative argument, adding a Maussian analysis of exchange and identity and evaluate its implications using Goody's data and our ethnographies. Finally, we consider the implications this raises for future research – and how these might be answered by ethnography and comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For such a ubiquitous urban form, neighborhoods have been subject of relatively sparse systematic archaeological scrutiny or theorization. This collection starts with first principles about social vectors of cooperation, and how neighborhoods emerge not only as durable manifestations of cooperation, but as human‐nonhuman assemblages for the production and dissolution of cooperation and community. Much as in the case of "community", neighborhoods derive their social efficacy and ethos of belonging both through their seemingly irreducible affordances of quotidian interaction and through more or less self‐conscious rituals or habits of affiliation. These both produce and are products of the material remains of neighborhoods that archaeologists study. With this generative view of neighborhood materiality in mind, this essay surveys the landscape of the archaeology of communities, and seeks pathways through the theoretical and methodological challenges it poses, as presented in the contributions to this volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American Indian neighborhoods were very much under construction during the late‐eleventh century at Cahokia in the American Bottom region of southwestern Illinois. A social order that transcended pre‐Mississippian village life may now be defined based on large‐scale excavations at East St. Louis and Cahokia proper. Architectural patterns and craft production debris within the greater central complex indicate possible religious, if not political or ethnic, divisions that did not form organically. At least some of this architecture was built specifically for sheltering and engaging other animate beings. The central problems in this analysis are distinguishing residential neighborhoods from other kinds of occupational zones and human neighbors from other‐than‐human residents. To this end, we generate new measures of architectural diversity, density, and positioning to identify the elements of Cahokian neighborhoods and examine how they were created and reconfigured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How will human societies evolve in the face of the massive changes humans themselves are driving in the earth systems? Currently, few data exist with which to address this question. I argue that archaeological datasets from islands provide useful models for understanding long-term socioecological responses to large-scale environmental change, by virtue of their longitudinal dimension and their relative insulation from broader biophysical systems. Reviewing how colonizing humans initiated biological and physical change in the insular Pacific, I show that varied adaptations to this dynamism caused diversification in social and subsistence systems. This diversification shows considerable path dependency related to the degree of heterogeneity/homogeneity in the distribution of food resources. This suggests that the extent to which the Anthropocene modifies agroeconomic land surfaces toward or away from patchiness will have profound sociopolitical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex urban polities developed in the Old World (5500–3500 BP) had several structural features in common, particularly their scale, their cereal agrarianism, and their environmental patterning. Accordingly, the demographic weight borne by agrarian subsistence in these environments is causally associated with emergent social complexity. Yet other Old World contexts also witness the Mid-Late Holocene emergence of socially complex societies, contexts that differ radically from those of the pristine states in their environmental organization. How can we account for this? I suggest that the model developed by Thomas Piketty, in his analysis of emergent wealth inequality in late modernity, has an unappreciated applicability in explaining the development of unequal social systems at larger time scales. I argue that Mediterranean environments are equivalent to the low-growth environments that he demonstrates exaggerate the speed at which wealth inequality grows. This has explanatory potential in the context of the otherwise problematic appearance of social complexity in low-growth environments, which, on the basis of current models orbiting around surplus, we might expect to discourage such emergence. Recognizing that highly varied ecological and economic pathways can lead to ostensibly very similar outcomes poses challenges to how we model emergent complexity in comparative perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author(s): Timothy A. Kohler (corresponding author) [1, 2, 3]; Michael E. Smith (corresponding author) [4]; Amy Bogaard [2, 5]; Gary M. Feinman [6]; Christian E. Peterson [7]; Alleen Betzenhauser [8]; [...]

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nature24646 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]