How Ancient Europeans Kept Inequality in Check for 5,000 Years todayheadline

For decades, historians and archaeologists have linked the rise of farming, especially plow agriculture, with the growth of lasting economic inequality.

A new Science Advances study challenges that assumption, drawing on five millennia of archaeological evidence from the Carpathian Basin in central Europe. By combining measures of house size, burial wealth, settlement patterns, and community projects, the researchers found that while inequality occasionally flared, it never grew steadily or persisted over the long term. Instead, communities repeatedly adopted “leveling mechanisms” such as dispersing into smaller settlements, burying goods with the dead, and investing surplus labor in shared infrastructure.

The Carpathian Basin as a Social Laboratory

Framed by the Carpathian Mountains and drained by the Danube River, the Carpathian Basin holds one of Europe’s richest archaeological records. The first farmers arrived from the Near East around 6000 BCE, bringing cereals, cattle, sheep, and goats. Over the next 5000 years, settlement forms shifted dramatically—from small riverside hamlets to vast enclosed villages, to scattered mobile camps, and later to monumental Bronze Age fortifications.

Rather than showing a continuous climb in wealth disparity after agriculture took hold, the study found that inequality in house sizes and grave goods rose and fell in cycles. Even after the introduction of plow agriculture, large fortified sites, and long-distance trade networks, average inequality levels remained relatively stable.

Measuring Ancient Inequality

The team analyzed two main types of wealth:

• Material wealth: measured by the Gini coefficient of house sizes within settlements, reflecting heritable property.
• Relational wealth: measured from burial goods, reflecting personal status and social networks.

Across 110 sites dated between 6000 and 1000 BCE, house-size Gini scores averaged 0.21—low by global historical standards—and showed no significant change over time. Burial Ginis were higher, but variation between cemeteries suggested localized differences rather than a region-wide trend toward entrenched elites.

Leveling Mechanisms and Social Resilience

The authors argue that Carpathian Basin societies avoided long-term inequality through strategies that limited the accumulation of heritable wealth. These included:

1. Removing wealth from circulation by placing valuable goods in graves rather than passing them on to heirs.
2. Community fission: Splitting into smaller groups when tensions rose, a pattern reflected in decreasing settlement lifespans over time.
3. Collective infrastructure projects such as massive ditches and enclosures, which required cooperation and channeled surplus labor into shared benefits.

“It is not that inequalities were never present, but rather that they were never great and did not continue to grow in multiple domains as they did in the Near East,” the authors write.

Challenging the Farming-Inequality Link

In the Near East, plow agriculture and traction animals are thought to have driven urbanism and entrenched social hierarchies by the fourth millennium BCE. In the Carpathian Basin, however, similar technologies did not produce the same outcome. The researchers suggest that land was rarely scarce enough to force competition, and that communal property norms may have dampened the potential for wealth concentration.

Implications for Understanding Inequality

This study adds nuance to global narratives about the origins of social inequality. It shows that agricultural intensification creates the potential for disparity, but whether that potential is realized depends on social choices, mobility, and cooperative institutions. The Carpathian Basin’s long history of community-based solutions offers a counterpoint to the idea that inequality after farming was inevitable.

Journal: Science Advances
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adu0323

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