The Emergence of Material Wealth-Based Inequality

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Dr. Anna Marie Prentiss, of the University of Montana, along with colleagues from the United States, Canada, and England will engage in research into the development of social inequality in village scale hunter-gatherer societies. The origins of inequality in ancient societies is a central concern in anthropological archaeology with significant implications for wider understanding of inequality in today's world. Previous research has documented conditions under which persistent institutionalized inequalities are likely to develop. These include the presence of defensible subsistence resources and the possibility for inter-generational transmission of wealth, access to wealth, and rights to wealth. Debate continues regarding the historical processes that give rise to material inequality with some reseachers asserting inequality to be an inevitable outcome of inherent human striving for personal economic and reproductive success under conditions of resource abundance versus others who argue that inequality is an unintended byproduct of competitive conditions during periods of resource shortfall. Archaeology is poised to offer significant contributions to these discussions given the ability to reconstruct social evolutionary process over lengthy time spans. The research is designed to facilitate extensive public outreach regarding indigenous culture and history along with STEM training opportunities for college students. Dr. Prentiss and her research team will examine the origins of material wealth-based inequality at the Bridge River village in the Middle Fraser Canyon of interior British Columbia. The Bridge River site is an ideal place to study the evolution of inequality given the excellent record of human occupation spanning the past 2000 years. This archaeological excavation project is designed to develop fine-grained tests of alternative hypotheses concerning variation in the integrated roles of demographic change, subsistence intensification, storage variability, social networking, and large scale cooking and food-sharing ("feasting") events associated with the origins of inequality. The interdisciplinary research team sets a new standard for excavation and laboratory study of prehistoric cooking features in Northwestern North America with analytical approaches including sediment micromorphology, ancient DNA analysis, plant tissue identification from carbonized remains, sediment geochemistry, and advanced approaches to stone artifact and animal bone studies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.