In this paper we illustrate the potential of interstitial areas, as distinct from both cores and peripheries, for understanding migration and environmental learning among maize farming populations. We analyze settlement data derived from pedestrian survey of a portion of the Rio Puerco (of the East) watershed in north-central New Mexico. Our exploratory analyses are suggestive of interesting patterns that speak to larger debates in the region, including the extent of the Gallina culture and migration pathways from the San Juan to Rio Grande drainage. Ceramic seriation with updated ceramic data indicates that residents of the survey area had shifting affiliations, with waves of migration from the Chaco, Mesa Verde, and Cibola regions, starting in Early Pueblo II and continuing through Late Pueblo III. Our analyses further refine the chronology and population dynamics of the region. We also provide evidence of settlement scaling, dynamic farming adaptations, and a history of burning at archaeological sites.

Adapting to a global urban future requires diverse, long-term perspectives on urbanism. URBank supports this by bringing together global deep-time urban datasets in a modern open-science computing platform. Its design eschews checklist definitions of cities, representing the variability of past urbanism and enabling systematic comparative spatiotemporal research.

One of the most important ways that archaeology can contribute to the knowledge base for navigating contemporary concerns is by assessing the large-scale and long-term consequences of various social arrangements. The most straightforward and objective way of measuring these consequences is through their effects on demographic rates and population health. Paleo-demographers have converged on the Juvenility Index—the probability of dying between the ages of 5 and 20, given survival to age 5—as a relevant measure that can be estimated reliably and consistently from archaeological skeletal assemblages. However, interpretations of the index in the literature have been contradictory and lead to opposing conclusions concerning mortality, fertility, and population growth rates. In this paper, we propose a method for resolving this inconsistency. We treat the Juvenility Index as an age-specific mortality indicator, translate it into measures of life expectancy and the probability of survival to reproductive age through correspondences with model life tables, and then combine these with intrinsic population growth rates derived from settlement evidence to estimate fertility measures. We apply this method in a case study in the US Southwest, obtaining results that are consistent with other lines of evidence in suggesting that changes in the social arrangements of Ancestral Pueblo society did in fact lead to increased life expectancy, increased levels of human capital, and reduced childbearing burdens in the centuries prior to Spanish contact. Based on these results, further application of the method appears promising.

We use archaeological data on house sizes to generate estimates for economic inequality and economic growth from the Early Holocene to about the first millennium AD. At worldwide scales these variables are positively but loosely related; patterns are more divergent at regional levels. Cross-sectional regression shows that the formation of central-place hierarchies and development of landesque capital (indicating land-limited production) were positively linked to both economic growth and inequality; development of bronze smelting, animal management, and farming were also positively linked to growth. Iron smelting was linked to reduced inequality whereas presence of copper smelting and animals for portage were linked to reduced growth. We track the dynamics of inequality and growth through time in SW Asia/SE Europe, Britain, and SE North America, and analyze the first two with general additive models. Examination of three well-known interaction zones (Bronze Age West Asia, the Classic Maya world, and first-millennium-AD Britain) shows surprisingly regular transformations of the relationship between economic growth and inequality on millennial time scales. Overall our findings emphasize a strong cumulative component to both economic growth (productivity) and economic inequality over the substantial portions of the pre-capitalist Holocene that we analyze.

Understanding urbanization trends, dynamics and environmental consequences is at the heart of charting sustainable futures in the 21st century. Interdisciplinary research is crucial to this, yet there often remains separation between the scales of urban analysis — searches for quantifiable, generalizable trends and detailed local, historical analyses — and between both scientific scales and policy. We argue for the importance of long-term institutional spaces and workflows that stimulate constant interaction between scalar perspectives and policy within a single epistemic, theory-based process to help to navigate an increasingly central way of human life.

The plaza is one of the most important elements of the built environment for bringing people together in the Pueblo World of the US Southwest. Yet, the myriad ways in which plazas were designed and used vary greatly through time. Although plazas have been significant components of Ancestral Pueblo site layouts for hundreds of years, nearly every research study has been based on the enclosed plazas of the Pueblo IV period. In this article, we evaluate variation in 861 plazas from the Pueblo World dating from AD 800 to 1550. Our analysis of settlement size, plaza area, and degrees of plaza accessibility demonstrates that the spacious plazas emblematic of the Pueblo IV period were built to accommodate more people than the resident population, suggesting the origins of the feast-day-type ceremonialism seen in contemporary Pueblo communities. Our analysis suggests that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, because plazas in earlier Chaco great house communities were built to be more exclusionary, and thus activities held within them were more restricted. La plaza es uno de los elementos m & aacute;s importantes del entorno construido para reunir a la poblaci & oacute;n en comunidades de Pueblos Ancestrales en el suroeste Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, las m & uacute;ltiples formas en que las plazas fueron dise & ntilde;adas y utilizadas muestran considerable variaci & oacute;n a lo largo del tiempo. Aunque las plazas han sido componentes significativos de los dise & ntilde;os de las comunidades Pueblo durante varios cientos de a & ntilde;os, los estudios sobre las mismas est & aacute;n basados casi exclusivamente en plazas cerradas del per & iacute;odo Pueblo IV. En este art & iacute;culo, investigamos las variaciones en 861 plazas del Mundo Pueblo que datan del 800 dC al 1550 dC. Nuestro an & aacute;lisis del tama & ntilde;o de los asentamientos, el & aacute;rea de la plazas y los grados de accesibilidad a las mismas demuestra que las plazas amplias emblem & aacute;ticas del per & iacute;odo Pueblo IV fueron construidas para acomodar a m & aacute;s personas que la poblaci & oacute;n residente, lo que sugiere el origen ceremonial del d & iacute;a festivo que se observa en las comunidades Pueblo contempor & aacute;neas. No obstante, nuestro an & aacute;lisis tambi & eacute;n muestra que este es un fen & oacute;meno relativamente reciente, ya que las plazas del Chaco de las grandes casas fueron construidas para ser mucho m & aacute;s excluyentes, lo que sugiere que las actividades realizadas dentro de estas eran de car & aacute;cter m & aacute;s restringido.

Understanding the relationship between inequality and economic growth is a critical science problem that hinders sustainable development. In 1955, Simon Kuznets hypothesized that rising economic growth raises inequality, which levels off as that growth continues. Kuznets' "curve," which is a cornerstone of development economics, was based on data from a small sample of rich capitalist economies. Here, we draw on the GINI database, which includes area measurements of 53,464 residences from 1,176 settlements dating from 21,000 BC to the present, and published data from the Spatial Analysis in Maya Studies (SAMS) group, to radically reevaluate Kuznets' curve. We use Gini coefficients of residential disparity, a proxy of inequality, and mean residence area, a proxy of productivity, to investigate past sustainable development in the Bronze Age Interaction Zone (BAIZ), the Mundo Maya, and Britain prior to, over the course of, and after the Roman conquest. We interpolate spatial patterns across each zone to statistically evaluate changes in inequality and economic growth. We find a recurring pattern in which phases of sustainable development, a rise in productivity without a rise in inequality, gave way to increasing inequality. These patterns resemble those Branko Milanovic termed "Kuznets' waves," albeit at timescales better described as "tides," which began after the introduction of weight metrology, an early form of economic governance associated with long-distance exchange. We posit that past sustainable development was predicated on balancing reciprocity from the bottom-up with mechanisms like early weight metrology but was repeatedly forestalled as inchoate elites co-opted these mechanisms.

Humans often live in neighborhoods, nested socio-spatial clusters within settlements of varying size and population density. In today's cities, neighborhoods are often characterized as relatively homogenous and may exhibit segregation along various socioeconomic dimensions. However, even within neighborhoods of similar social or economic status, there is often residential disparity, which in turn impacts perceived inequality. Drawing on the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project database, we study housing inequality within a sample of neighborhoods using the Gini coefficient of residential unit area and related measures of inequality. We examine patterns of intracommunity inequality within more than 80 settlements from diverse spatiotemporal contexts including some of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, the Classic Maya region, the Central Andes, and the Indus River Basin. Residential disparity differs within and among sectors of these settlements; some neighborhoods exhibit more similarity in residence size, resulting in lower degrees of housing inequality, while other sectors display greater variations in residence size with higher degrees of housing inequality. We observe a meaningful relationship between neighborhood inequality and population size, but not date of foundation or longevity of occupation. The macro-level structural processes associated with varying forms of governance seem to trickle down to the scale of the neighborhood. These findings may help explain why more unequal systems are not necessarily more unstable, as the inequality people experienced in their neighborhoods may generally have been less than that present in the overall settlement.

Here, we assess the extent to which land use relating to food acquisition (farming, herding, foraging) and associated value regimes shaped past economic inequality. We consider the hypothesis that land-use systems in which production was limited by heritable material wealth (such as land) sustained higher levels of inequality than those limited by (free) human labor. We address this hypothesis using the Global Dynamics of InequalIty (GINI) project database, estimating economic inequalities based on disparities in residential unit area and storage capacity within sites in different world regions and through time. We find that inequality was significantly greater in land-limited than labor-limited regimes, whether based on residence area or storage capacity, though governance could moderate these differences. Increasing inequality with larger residence and/or site size is associated with underlying shifts from labor- to land-limited economies. Transitions from labor- to land-limited regimes also appear to underlie the development of extended political hierarchies. Increases in inequality after cultivation became common in each hemisphere similarly reflect shifts from labor- to land-limited systems. Land-limited systems in the eastern hemisphere, incorporating animal traction, exhibit an upward trend in inequality over time, while a downward trend in the western hemisphere reflects the lower persistence of land-limited regimes based solely on human labor.

Defining wealth broadly to include wealth in people, relational connections, and material possessions, we examine the prehistory of wealth inequality at the level of the residential units using the consistent proxy of Gini coefficients calculated across areas of contemporaneous residential units. In a sample of >1,100 sites and > 47,000 residential units spanning >10,000 y, persistent wealth inequality typically lags the onset of plant cultivation by more than a millennium. It accompanies landscape modifications and subsistence practices in which land (rather than labor) limits production, and growth of hierarchies of settlement size. Gini coefficients are markedly higher through time in settlements at or near the top of such hierarchies; settlements not enmeshed in these systems remain relatively egalitarian even long after plant and animal domestication. We infer that some households in top-ranked settlements were able to exploit the network effects, agglomeration opportunities, and (eventually) political leverage provided by these hierarchies more effectively than others, likely boosted by efficient intergenerational transmission of material resources after increased sedentism made that more common. Since population growth is associated with increased sedentism, more land-limited production, and the appearance and growth of settlement hierarchies, it is deeply implicated in the postdomestication rise of wealth inequality. Governance practices mediate the degree of wealth inequality, as do technical innovations such as the use of animals for portage, horseback riding, and the development of iron smelting.

The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure commonly used to characterize distributions of socioeconomic quantities. Archaeologists and social scientists have recently adopted this method to analyze ancient inequality by targeting specific proxy variables (e.g., residential unit size, burial data, etc.). Variations in the Gini are then examined in relation to key factors such as time, geography, and subsistence. Yet, Gini coefficients could be obtained across different scales of aggregation, from small neighborhoods within a larger settlement to an ensemble of multiple settlements that are part of the same polity. These different scales of aggregation represent considerable methodological and theoretical challenges, as larger scales might, for example, imply greater social and economic variation within groups and thus affect the Gini coefficients. Furthermore, these issues can also be exacerbated by the idiosyncrasies and limitations of historical and archaeological datasets. This paper discusses the potential and challenges of measuring Gini coefficients at and above the scale of individual archaeological sites, contrasting different approaches and discussing how each can reveal insights into different patterns of past wealth inequality, addressing methodological, empirical, and theoretical implications arising from the multiscalar nature of human interactions.

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.

We address three basic issues regarding the long-term dynamics of inequality in society. First, we consider the interpretation of residence sizes in socioeconomic terms by comparing statistical patterns extracted from the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) Project database with those from the 21st-century United States. Second, we examine the degree to which the size and productivity of human networks is systematically related to inequality. Finally, we investigate relationships between productivity and productivity growth distributions for patterns of inequality and development across preindustrial societies. We find that across preindustrial societies residence size distributions provide a reasonable proxy for the distribution of productivity (income, a flow of physical and social resources to the group) and a minimum estimator for the distribution of wealth (a stock of such resources accumulated over time); that scale and productivity affect levels of inequality but account for only a small fraction of the observed variance across societies; and that inequality growth is independent of productivity growth, on average and over time. These findings have important implications for efforts to promote more equitable economic development in the present.

In this article, we explore transformations and continuities in cosmology and cultural landscape structure across Pueblo history in the US Southwest. Many researchers have directly compared the archaeology of the society centered at Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 850-1140) in northwestern New Mexico with ethnographic documentation of Pueblo communities from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This approach makes it difficult to understand how cultural transformation played out in the intervening centuries. Here, we investigate this history by comparing Kin Nizhoni, a Chaco-era Great House community in the Red Mesa Valley, with Wiyo'owingeh, a post-Chacoan community in the Rio Grande Valley. We find that the built environments of both sites expressed similar cosmological principles, but architectural expressions of these concepts became less explicitly marked over time. We also find that this similar cosmology was mapped onto different social structures, with a focus on elite architecture in the Chaco era as opposed to communal dwellings with spatially separated shrines in later Pueblo contexts. We close by proposing a connection between the functions of Chacoan Great Houses and later Pueblo World Quarter Shrines. Overall, our findings underscore the utility of cultural landscape studies for tracing relationships between religion and society across North American Indigenous histories. En este art & iacute;culo, exploramos las transformaciones y continuidades en la cosmolog & iacute;a y la estructura del paisaje cultural a lo largo de la historia de los pueblos del suroeste de Estados Unidos. Muchos investigadores han comparado directamente la arqueolog & iacute;a de la sociedad centrada en el Ca & ntilde;& oacute;n Chaco (aproximadamente entre 850 y 1140 dC) en el noroeste de Nuevo M & eacute;xico con la documentaci & oacute;n etnogr & aacute;fica de las comunidades de los pueblos de los siglos XIX y XX. Este enfoque dificulta la comprensi & oacute;n de c & oacute;mo se desarroll & oacute; la transformaci & oacute;n cultural en los siglos intermedios. Aqu & iacute;, investigamos esta historia comparando Kin Nizhoni, una comunidad de la era chacoana en el Valle de Red Mesa, con Wiyo'owingeh, una comunidad post-chacoana en el Valle del R & iacute;o Grande. Descubrimos que los entornos construidos de ambos sitios expresan principios cosmol & oacute;gicos similares, pero las expresiones arquitect & oacute;nicas de estos conceptos se volvieron menos expl & iacute;citas con el tiempo. Tambi & eacute;n descubrimos que esta cosmolog & iacute;a similar se traz & oacute; en diferentes estructuras sociales, con un enfoque en la arquitectura de & eacute;lite durante la era chacoana frente a las viviendas comunales con santuarios separados espacialmente en contextos posteriores de los pueblos. Concluimos proponiendo una conexi & oacute;n entre las funciones de las grandes casas chacoanas y los posteriores santuarios del barrio mundial de los pueblos. En general, nuestros hallazgos subrayan la utilidad de los estudios del paisaje cultural para rastrear las relaciones entre la religi & oacute;n y la sociedad a lo largo de las historias ind & iacute;genas de Am & eacute;rica del Norte.

The transition from dispersed to aggregated forms of settlement reflects a critical shift in the relative value of social and primary (food) modes of production. However, investigating trade-offs between these different forms of settlement requires estimates of the extent of community territories, including their nearby arable land. Here we demonstrate a simple algorithm to do that. Our algorithm is analogous to that used to define core-based statistical areas for the US census, though instead of central business districts, we rely on community centers (or areas of known and persistent interaction between unrelated individuals). We provide examples of our algorithm by applying it to archaeological sites in the central Mesa Verde, northern Rio Grande, and Cibola regions in the US Southwest. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to demonstrate how each tuning parameter contributes to the algorithm.

While the impact of population density on key urban attributes has received considerable research attention, the relationship between areal extent and population size remains less explored and largely undertheorized. In this study, we analyze the systematic relationship between the total area and population of urbanized areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau from 1950 to 2020. The delineated urban areas represent a long-standing effort to demarcate spaces where “urban life” takes place. Utilizing urban scaling theory, we characterize this relationship as a scale-invariant function of city population size, demonstrating that its predicted elasticity has remained consistent, within statistical uncertainty, over seven decades. We also examine the temporal variations in the prefactor of these scaling relationships in the context of technological changes. Our findings reveal that the predicted relationship between area and population size underscores the fact that urban areas are fundamentally social networks embedded within physical and infrastructural spaces.

Since its start about 15 years ago, urban scaling research has become a vibrant component of the emerging field of urban science. Initially, this work focused on the identification of nonlinear relationships in urban quantities relative to population size, but more recently it has expanded to include efforts to explain observed scaling relationships in terms of new theory. We find that some misunderstandings have arisen in the literature concerning the nature and purpose of this work. Here, we address several persistent questions that have been raised with respect to urban scaling theory, clarify what we perceive to be its achievements and distinctiveness, and highlight questions and areas of opportunity for future work.

A key question in economic history is the degree to which preindustrial economies could generate sustained increases in per capita productivity. Previous studies suggest that, in many preindustrial contexts, growth was primarily a consequence of agglomeration. Here, we examine evidence for three different socioeconomic rates that are available from the archaeological record for Roman Britain. We find that all three measures show increasing returns to scale with settlement population, with a common elasticity that is consistent with the expectation from settlement scaling theory. We also identify a pattern of increase in baseline rates, similar to that observed in contemporary societies, suggesting that this economy did generate modest levels of per capita productivity growth over a four-century period. Last, we suggest that the observed growth is attributable to changes in transportation costs and to institutions and technologies related to socioeconomic interchange. These findings reinforce the view that differences between ancient and contemporary economies are more a matter of degree than kind.