The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire

"This book is all about how societies scaled up and stratification developed. If we go back before 10-12,000 years ago, current evidence suggests that most societies were relatively egalitarian; they didn’t have different social classes. What Flannery and Marcus do very systematically is document different ways in which societies have scaled up and become more complex, and added inequality by having social stratification. The beautiful part for me is the way they integrate ethnography. They go back and pull together many different ethnographic sources on different societies around the world, societies that we know a lot about because a lot of anthropologists have been there and recorded the details of how the society functions. Then they put that together and use it to enrich archaeological cases, whether from Mesoamerica—Mayan, Aztecs, Inca societies—or Mesopotamia and other places. The problem with archaeology is that you just have the material remains of past societies. It is hard to make inferences about the religion or social structure from the buildings that were left over, the tools people used, or the foods people ate. But Flannery and Marcus show, in my view persuasively, that you can use ethnographic cases to enrich your understanding of the archaeological record, and then look at how things like religion, the organisation of clans, and a bunch of different social factors allow some societies to scale up and get stratification, whereas other societies seem impeded by their social structure from scaling up. They don’t end up being larger and more integrated, but they also don’t end up with high degrees of social inequality. What you do is you map the things you can see in the material record. So you have burials, for example. How are people buried? What are they buried with? What are their children buried with? If a society is achievement-based, then the kids haven’t achieved anything, and the kids are buried without any trappings. But in societies where you have hereditary power, in which one group of people are better by virtue of their birth than other people, then the kids often get buried with lots of fancy stuff. That’s one of the markers you can use, and you can see that that is persistently the case in societies where we know the details from ethnographically-known societies. Then, when we look back in the archaeological record, sometimes you see societies that have big monumental architecture. That might make you think, ‘Oh! social stratification, they must have had hereditary chiefs.’ But then you see that the kids aren’t buried in a fancy way. Then you can begin to look at other parts of the economy — distribution of house sizes, say, or the kinds of crops planted, trade. It points to something that is recurrent in the work of many researchers — also like Peter Turchin, the ecologist-turned-historian. When societies are competing, this high competition tends to keep inequality down. Then, over time, the elite of a society—consciously or unconsciously—gradually twist the institutions and change the social norms so they get a disproportionate share of the pie. What we are seeing is a process that’s repeated itself many, many times over, where gradually, over a long period of time, the elites change the rules of the game so they are increasingly favoured. There are various ways to get out of the trap. The usual one is revolution, collapse and discord, but hopefully there are other ways out too."