How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a long-term perspective. Although various archaeological proxies for wealth, such as burial goods or exotic or expensive-to-manufacture goods in household assemblages, have been proposed, the first is not clearly connected with households, and the second is confounded by abandonment mode and other factors. As a result, numerous questions remain concerning the growth of wealth disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale. Here we show that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions. However, unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North America and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, became evident after the end of the Neolithic period. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia were initially due to the greater availability of large mammals that could be domesticated, because they allowed more profitable agricultural extensification, and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities (political units that cohere via identity, ability to mobilize resources, or governance) to sizes that were not possible in North America and Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans. We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate other work to enlarge this sample to include societies in South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania that were under-sampled or not included in this study.

中文翻译：

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欧亚大陆后新石器时代的财富差距比北美和中美洲更大


财富在家庭之间的分配方式可以让我们深入了解社会的基本特征及其为社会流动提供的机会。然而，在我们没有书面记录的古代社会，经济不平等一直很难研究，这增加了从长远角度看待当前贫富差距的挑战。尽管考古学上已经提出了各种财富的代表物，例如家庭组合中的随葬品或异国情调或制造昂贵的物品，但第一个与家庭没有明确的联系，第二个则受到遗弃模式和其他因素的影响。因此，关于财富差距扩大的许多问题仍然存在，包括它们与驯化动植物的发展以及社会政治规模扩大的关系。在这里，我们使用基于房屋面积分布的单一一致代理计算的基尼系数表明，随着动植物的驯化以及社会政治规模的扩大，财富差距通常会增加。然而，在新石器时代结束后，北美、中美洲以及欧亚大陆社会对这些因素的反应出现了意想不到的差异。 我们认为，新石器时代后欧亚大陆普遍较高的财富差距最初是由于可驯化的大型哺乳动物的可用性更大，因为它们允许更有利可图的农业扩张，并最终导致了能够骑乘的战士精英的发展。将政治（通过身份、调动资源的能力或治理凝聚在一起的政治单位）扩大到欧洲人到来之前北美和中美洲不可能实现的规模。我们预计这项分析将刺激其他工作，扩大样本范围，将南美洲、非洲、南亚和大洋洲的社会纳入本研究中抽样不足或未纳入的社会。