Every society has some degree of wealth inequality -- over history, across continents, there always seem to be some people who have more than others. But the amount of inequality differs -- in some civilizations, a few powerful people have nearly all the wealth, whereas in others, it's more spread out. In a new study in PLOS ONE, archaeologists examined the remains of houses in ancient Maya cities and compared them with other Mesoamerican societies; they found that the societies with the most wealth inequality were also the ones that had governments that concentrated power with a smaller number of people.

Fig 3. The plazuela and house size.
Fig 3. The plazuela and house size. - A schematic of the plazuela as the residential unit. We use the plazuela (bottom right) as it represents the entire domestic activity area and hilltop modifications.

Amy E. Thompson, Gary M. Feinman, Keith M. Prufer. Assessing Classic Maya multi-scalar household inequality in southern Belize. PLOS ONE, 2021; 16 (3): e0248169 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248169

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.

Fig 2. Settlement map of Uxbenká and Ix Kuku’il.
Fig 2. Settlement map of Uxbenká and Ix Kuku’il. - Plazuela, neighborhood, district, and polity boundaries of Uxbenká and Ix Kuku’il. Trade routes based on Least Cost Path analyses and perennial streams are also displayed on the map.