Inequality declined in the Bronze Age city of Mohenjo-daro
Published version
Peer-reviewed
Repository URI
Repository DOI
Type
Change log
Authors
Abstract
Mohenjo-daro was a major city of the Indus Civilisation ( c . 2600–1900 BC), with excavations revealing evidence for public infrastructure, civic amenities and hundreds of residences. Archaeologists traditionally assume that urbanism is accompanied by economic stratification, but, at Mohenjo-daro, qualitative evidence of inequality is absent. Drawing on early excavation data, the authors here calculate Gini coefficients of residence area, providing a quantitative proxy of economic inequality. Their results indicate that Gini coefficients, and thus inequality, declined over time, coinciding with increased prosperity and the development of the city’s street plan, indicating that governance likely helped limit economic inequality.
Description
Acknowledgements: We thank the organisers of the Global Dynamics of Inequality Project (GINI) for convening the working group that prompted us to assemble these data, especially Tim Kohler, Amy Bogaard and Scott Ortman. We also thank Amy Thompson and Dan Lawrence for discussions that helped improve the article, and our departments at the universities of York and Cambridge for supporting our participation in the project. We are also grateful to the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, Sante Fe Institute, and GINI project participants. Each of these communities provided a vital sounding board for the argument developed in this article. This work has benefited from conversations with Uzma Rizvi, J. Greg Smith, Sara Eichner and other members of the Laboratory for Integrative Archaeological Visualization and Heritage team, whose work is helping advance our understanding of Mohenjo-daro’s legacy dataset. We further acknowledge the efforts of the two anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback and critique. Finally, we thank Toby C. Wilkinson, Darryl Wilkinson, Tom Leppard, Nancy Highcock and Gary Feinman for an ongoing conversation about the archaeology of inequality that has strengthened this work.
Publication status: Published
Journal Title
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
1745-1744
Volume Title
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Rights and licensing
