The development of social inequality and political hierarchy in village societies

Anthropologists have come to realize that the emergence of wealth inequalities and hierarchical distinctions in mortuary displays were not inevitable progressions but changes in social conditions that need to be explained. Similarly, the expansion of such differences to a regional level – where several villages pay tribute to a regional political ruler – was uncommon enough to suggest that there were powerful mechanisms promoting village autonomy. My research focuses on how to reliably document such changes in the archaeological record and why various forms of hierarchy emerge and collapse.

Spatial and network analysis

How humans organize in space is a crucial indication of the pushes and pulls affecting their lives. Over time, archaeology and geography have developed conceptual tools to study the regional dynamics of settlement systems. One such tool, the geographic information system (GIS), is increasingly the ‘container’ that organizes archaeological data in space. Spatial analyses for evaluating prehistoric settlement patterns such as extent of clustering and least cost paths pre-date GIS but are accomplished with much less labour because of it. My work uses the computational abilities of GIS to demonstrate patterns in space and test specific hypotheses about how and why people in prehistory used the landscape the way they did. Network models do not require spatial information, but are increasingly used as tools for thinking about the relationships between people in ancient societies.

Bronze Age Europe

During the European Bronze Age (c. 2700 – 750 BC), craft production intensified, and many settlements built large fortifications. Mortuary displays favoured fewer and fewer people, concentrating large amounts of objects such as bronze axes, gold hair curls, and amber necklaces in only a small percentage of burials. Some people attribute these changes to the influence of hierarchical Indo-European culture forged in the Russian steppe environment a thousand years early. Others argue it was an indigenous development in which local leaders controlled practices such as bronze metallurgy, or restricted the extent and directional flow of valuables into the regional cultural system. Whatever the causes, many archaeologists believe that regional political hierarchies were common features of Bronze Age Europe.

While this may be true in some cases, my research in eastern Hungary suggests that the Bronze Age landscape was variable in the extent to which economic and political control was regionally consolidated. The long term goal of my research in the Carpathian Basin is to understand how the interaction of similar people and cultural systems over a large area could produce diverging economic and political trajectories favouring regional hierarchy in some cases but autonomous villages in others.