Balancing the scales: archaeological approaches to social inequality

Archaeology lends a critical perspective to research on social inequality due to the field’s unique access to deep history, emphasis on materiality, and explicit incorporation of multiple lines of evidence. This paper offers a concise overview of archaeological approaches aimed at students and scholars in other fields. We develop a categorization of disciplinary strategies, arguing that archaeologists address institutionalized inequality through examining inequalities in the accumulation of goods or resources (economic differentiation); access to resources or knowledge (social differentiation), and inequalities in action, the ability to make decisions for oneself or others (political differentiation). We illustrate these categories with reference to the distinctions between material, relational, and embodied wealth. We draw upon a broad range of geographic, chronological, and cultural case studies to illustrate the flexibility and utility of archaeological methods for answering questions about inequality in human societies.