Mark McCoy is a professor of anthropology and archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology at Florida State University whose research focuses on ancient societies of the Pacific Islands - including Hawai'i, New Zealand and Rapa Nui - and the relationship between people and their environments. McCoy is part of an international, multi-institution team analyzing the relationship between war and inequality over the past 10,000 years. Their work was published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
What was the motivation behind this paper?
Our team is made up of archaeologists specializing in different areas of the world who are all interested in inequality, especially the emergence and the dynamics of wealth and economic inequality. Archaeological records and evidence of housing date back tens of thousands of years, and so does evidence of inequality. For example, when we look at archaeological records and see a village in which everybody lived in houses of the same size, we understand that there wasn't much inequality during that time compared to records showing one large house built alongside many smaller houses. We assembled an archaeological database that represents more than 55,000 housing floor area measurements from areas in the world including North America, South America, East Asia, Europe and Oceania from non-industrial societies around 12,000 years ago to the recent past when industrialization began in order to accumulate a long record of inequality.
In addition to the size of the houses, we compiled data about if these settlements were in some way fortified, walled, or guarded due to conflict or warfare. We started to analyze whether these fortifications made a difference in inequality - are we seeing patterns of warfare increasing wealth gaps, or do we see warfare acting as a leveling factor that increases equality during conflict? The answer varies based on what time period we're analyzing and certain factors of the communities, which emphasizes the dynamics of inequality through time.
In the distant past, was there a link between war or conflict and inequality?
Between 10,000 years ago and about 5,000 years ago, we find a lot of fortifications in settlements and evidence of warfare. However, while these communities were in conflict, warfare served as a leveling tool, and there isn't much evidence of inequality - houses from these times were similar in size. This tells us that in early, more collectively organized societies, conflict and warfare didn't increase inequality in these communities.
When do you start to see a link between war and inequality?
We start seeing warfare associated with an increase in inequality under certain community conditions, such as if land is a limited resource or not. Variables that are considered include how people were growing and farming their own food, as the amount of available farmland becomes a limiting factor for agriculture. For example, on the islands I research, adding more people to your community doesn't mean you can produce more food because there's simply not enough airable land. That's when the balance shifts - these are the conditions in which we start to see warfare ramping up inequality. When land becomes a scarce resource that can be monopolized, that's when inequality really increases.
Another variable we consider is governance. In each settlement we analyzed, were there signs of active governance similar to the collective governance we observe in the modern world, or did the governance look less collective and more authoritarian? We observed warfare increasing inequality in communities in which the governance was less collective and more authoritarian.
How were these records gathered?
Something unique about this work is that we didn't go out to dig sites - we gathered information from published data and capitalized on the great fieldwork and other research that was done over many decades and compiled all the data together to draw conclusions. In assembling our database, we compiled readily available data from previously conducted excavations and from techniques including remote sensing and LiDAR, which uses light detection and ranging to unveil new understandings of building shapes and orientations. This, to me, is a big part of the future of archaeology: using the quantitative data that we already have, like the square footage of a house and how many fortifications a settlement has, to answer questions about the qualitative side of things and uncover new insights using existing archaeological data.
What is important for people to know about this research?
As archaeologists and anthropologists, we're interested in why things like inequality occur. This research illustrates key factors that contribute to this, including if land is a scarce resource in a particular community. It also shows us that certain communities were able to govern themselves in a collective way that reduced inequality for them, and it shows the complex relationship between conflict and inequality. We used archaeological records to identify what factors steer inequality, which is a new way of doing archaeology.
To learn more about research conducted in the FSU Department of Anthropology, visit anthro.fsu.edu.
