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Recent archaeological findings in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge suggest that stone alignments might represent ancient shelters used by Homo habilis, a species that existed approximately 1.7 million years ago and is part of human evolutionary history.
However, concrete evidence of housing structures dates back over 20,000 years, a period marked by extensive glaciation across large areas of North America, Europe, and Asia, when human societies were just beginning to establish settled communities.
The gap between these ancient findings and the onset of the industrial age reveals not only the evolution of human habitation but also the emergence of social inequalities over time.
This research is detailed in a study available in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It utilizes a comprehensive archaeological database that catalogs over 55,000 housing floor area measurements from sites across different continents. The insights from this dataset support various studies exploring the relationships between housing size and socioeconomic inequalities.
Scott Ortman, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder, collaborated with experts Amy Bogaard from the University of Oxford and Timothy Kohler from the University of Florida in this research. Ortman notes that the exploration of inequality in archaeological contexts has been a longstanding interest in the field. “While many studies focus on historical inequality, our work broadens the understanding of this issue by examining it within a wider archaeological narrative,” he elaborates.
Dissecting Inequality
Ortman, Bogaard, and Kohler also serve as co-principal investigators on the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) Project, based at the CU Boulder Center for Collaborative Synthesis in Archaeology. This initiative aims to enrich the database with a variety of housing floor area measurements sourced globally.
The team analyzed the patterns of inequality evident in the database, comparing these findings against other indicators of economic prosperity, social stability, and conflict, thereby uncovering the broader social ramifications tied to inequality.
“We basically crowdsourced this information,” Ortman explains. “By reaching out to archaeologists around the world, we were able to compile a database that reflects the archaeological record of housing across diverse regions.”
Undergraduate and graduate research students contributed to the compilation, which includes findings from historically significant locations such as Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as numerous sites from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Although the database does not encompass all existing archaeological data, substantial efforts were made to gather significant information from various excavation methods, including remote sensing and LiDAR technology.
The compiled housing data spans back roughly 12,000 years, terminating around the industrial revolution, serving as a foundation for ten research papers focusing on the connections between housing and economic disparity, as highlighted in the special feature of the journal.
Common Threads in Housing
The second identified challenge is governance stability; research spanning 25 years indicates a strong relationship between elevated economic inequality and political turmoil, illustrating the correlation between wealth distribution and the health of democratic institutions.
Ortman and his team indicate that the archaeological evidence of long-term income and wealth inequality allows for an exploration of the underlying factors fueling such disparities. Their research capitalizes on the principle that residences from the same time frame and geographical area share similar climatic and cultural contexts.
The special feature comprises various studies reflecting on economic growth’s relationship with inequality. “Rather than solely looking at average house sizes, we’re also examining how house sizes change over time,” Ortman states.
“We’ve also organized data from different regions alongside historical timelines to better understand changes in housing across cultures.”
The papers address various topics, including how land exploitation and conflict impact housing inequality, as well as the duration of habitation in relation to housing disparities. One significant study revealed parallels between archaeological housing data and modern real estate indicators, suggesting that residential area variation correlates with income inequality in preindustrial societies.
Bogaard asserts, “Our findings indicate that extreme wealth inequality can become established under certain ecological and political conditions, but it is not a straightforward consequence of agricultural practices. It tends to arise when land becomes a limited resource that can be monopolized. Furthermore, our research highlights that some societies managed to prevent significant inequality through effective governance.”
The authors propose that the archaeological evidence indicates that sustainable economic development hinges on policies that minimize the link between individual household productivity and overall productivity growth.
Further Reading: Kohler, Timothy A., Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2400691122.
The GINI Project’s database and its analytical tools will be made available to the public through the Digital Archaeological Record.
Source
phys.org