Assessing Prehistoric Inequality in Europe

This “greatest hits” list presents us with an image of accelerating inequality, which satisfies the social evolution narrative mandate discussed earlier. But this view evokes three related critiques. First, some components are questionable on their own terms. For example, the deceased in Upper Paleolithic burials are more usually interpreted as ritual specialists or people dying in particular circumstances than as “chiefs” (Pettitt Reference Pettitt2011). Similarly, a reexamination of Iberian Copper and Bronze Age sequences shows that interpretations of hierarchy have often been overstated and that resistance to hierarchy was common (Cruz Berrocal et al. Reference Berrocal, María and Gilman2013).

Second, there are theoretical grounds for questioning this image of growing inequality. It takes a sectional view of society, particularly that of “politically active” adult males—perhaps 10%–20% of prehistoric society—and treats it as universal, as representing the central facts about society. It also focuses narrowly on one form of interaction—hierarchy—rather than assessing social interaction more globally. Similarly, it relies above all on burial evidence, particularly for periods before the Iron Age. It is generally assumed that a person’s persona in burial not only provides a truthful report on their social role in life but also represents the most central social fact about them—how they would actually have interacted with others in everyday contexts—rather than how they were presented in a particular ritualized, formalistic context. For example, the elaborate Early Bronze Age burials noted earlier show individuals whose social persona (as represented in death) displays exotic valuable goods, implying they controlled economic resources; yet, this picture is virtually never mirrored by the evidence from life of similar levels of distinction in housing, storage capacities, management of collective projects, occupational status, conditions of life, and so on. Thus, nonburial evidence is discounted, and burial evidence is both taken at face value and relied on disproportionately to proclaim a general state of inequality, much as in the “defining impurity” paradigm. Moreover, as Fontijn (Reference Fontijn, Timothy and Fernández-Götz2021) insightfully points out, “power requires others”: perhaps influenced by neoliberalism, a narrow focus on individuals ignores social interaction of all kinds.

The third critique goes to the heart of the “greatest hits” approach: it treats a subset of sites and cultures as representing the whole picture of European prehistory. How representative is this subset? Quite possibly, it is highly unrepresentative. One reason the same examples are repeatedly cited to illustrate prehistoric inequality may be that most other contemporary societies do not actually provide such evidence. If you were walking across Europe at a given moment, would inequality be normal? To return to the paradigm example of lavish Early Bronze Age (EBA) burials, such burials are found sporadically. In much of EBA Europe (as in most of the Mediterranean), the dead were not even commemorated in ways that preserved their social persona intact. Where individual burials were the norm—such as the huge EBA cemeteries at Franzhausen and Gemeinlebarn in Austria and at Arano in Italy—they usually show a much more restricted range of differentiation. To take one well-studied example, O’Shea’s (Reference O’Shea1996) analysis of the Maros villagers in Serbia/Hungary explicitly attempted to use burial data to find social inequality in the New Archaeology tradition. It succeeded in outlining social roles in a small community of a dozen or two families. Families differed in access to wealth, yet the range was very limited; there were multiple complementary social roles, and differentiation based on age and gender was more important than status (see also Žegarac et al. Reference Žegarac, Winkelbach, Blöcher, Diekmann, Gavrilović, Porčić and Stojković2021). It is hardly a picture of life driven by dominant “elites” or “chiefs”: it is much more complex and interesting than that.

For any period in European prehistory, you can always find inequalities of some kind if you search for them assiduously enough. That does not mean that they always represent the same kind of social phenomenon. Nor does it mean that inequality provided the only or dominant way of organizing social interaction, so that we can designate that period “inegalitarian” and close the book. Hence, let me present an alternative hypothesis: in all periods up to and including the Iron Age, most archaeological contexts do not provide convincing evidence of social inequality as a central principle of social organization. This hypothesis can be tested.

Methods for Qualitative, Big-Picture Assessment

Assessing social inequality archaeologically is complex, and identifying relevant data depends how we define inequality itself. Here we are simply interested in a coarse-grained, broad qualitative assessment. And because it addresses an argument posed originally by New Archaeology social evolutionism, it seems appropriate to use New Archaeological evidential criteria. Table 1 lists a range of traits that classic New Archaeological sources (Peebles and Kus Reference Peebles and Kus1977; Wason Reference Wason1994) consider to be indicative of inequality. Such traits still provide the backbone of most archaeological analyses of inequality. New evidence is emerging from more recently developed methods, particularly stable isotopic and aDNA analyses, but it is not widely available enough to provide a general picture, particularly within any specific region. Every trait obviously indexes social inequality accurately in some circumstances. Equally obviously, each also affords counterexamples where archaeologists try to read generalized individual inequality into something that is heterarchical, collective, ambiguous, or contextual. Thus, including a trait here does not mean that its presence necessarily implies social inequality, merely that it has sometimes been considered as doing so. However, the exercise still gives a prima facie idea of whether there might be a case for inequality in any given period and what the preponderance of evidence suggests.

Table 1.

Archaeological Criteria Used to Assess the Possible Presence of Social Inequality.

¹ This criterion is omitted from the analysis here as textual records are lacking for all but a few of the Iron Age II groups.

Evaluating the entirety of European prehistory would be an immense task. As a sample area of manageable size, I review the prehistory of the Central Mediterranean, including Italy, Malta, and adjacent areas of Croatia, Slovenia, and France (Figure 1). This is one of the best-researched prehistoric sequences in Europe. It extends from Mediterranean islands to high Alpine peaks, includes maritime and continental zones, and connects mineral-rich zones, landscapes of transhumance, trans-Alpine trade routes, and colonial contacts with Eastern Mediterranean civilizations. Although every area of Europe has its own unique features, the Central Mediterranean provides an unusually diverse and representative sequence, indeed a microcosm of European prehistory.

Figure 1.

The Central Mediterranean.

For the Central Mediterranean prehistoric sequence, the criteria listed in Table 1 were evaluated through a broad qualitative review (see Supplementary Text 1). For each period, each trait was categorized broadly: 0 = no cases known; 1 = sporadic cases are known, but it is not found in most groups; 2 = it is known in many groups; 3 = it is known in most groups; and 4 = it is found in all groups. These were tracked for conventional archaeological periods (see also Supplementary Text 1). Bases for qualitative assessments and some typical or important examples are presented in Supplementary Table 2.

Results are presented in Figure 2. (For comparison, Figure 2 also includes a characterization of societies in which social inequality is unequivocally present, such as Mesopotamian city-states, ancient Egypt, the Maya, the Inka, ancient Rome, and medieval Europe.) However, archaeological periods may not represent the balance of human experience accurately; for instance, “periods” vary greatly in duration, from the 30,000+-year Upper Paleolithic to the 300-year Iron Age I, so that treating all archaeological periods equally valorizes change over stability. Hence Figure 3 charts the results by real-time chronological intervals.

Figure 2.

Possible archaeological indicators of social inequality in Central Mediterranean prehistory. (Color online)

Figure 3.

Possible archaeological indicators of social inequality in Central Mediterranean prehistory scaled according to chronological time: (A) Upper Paleolithic through Iron Age; (B) Neolithic through the Iron Age. (Color online)

Results: Most of the People, Most of the Time …

Does the preponderance of archaeological evidence support a picture of widespread, systematic inequality? Coarse-grained though this exercise is, the results are clear. When the project prioritizes finding inequality, as in the “greatest hits” approach, attention focuses on individual cases of its presence. But assuming that the clearest expression of inequality represents how most people actually lived everywhere or how they would have lived in an ideally evidenced, unilinear developmental narrative is simply a way of prioritizing inequality over equality in narrative.

In fact, when we flip the narrative and ask how most people really lived, the picture changes dramatically. The only “indicator” of inequality that is consistently found across deep time is the long-distance exchange in exotic objects, such as spondylus shell, obsidian, and axes. But such exchange is common in both nonhierarchical and hierarchical contexts around the world. Furthermore, although exotic objects were certainly valued, handled, assessed aesthetically, and sometimes ritually deposited, they do not seem to have been regarded as accessories for personalizing value; before about 3500 BC they were almost never deposited with burials. Moderate levels of ritualism may imply the presence of local ritual leaders, but there is no evidence that they held powers in other contexts. Similarly, skillfully crafted objects such as pottery may have been made by certain people with recognized special abilities, but there is no suggestion that such objects formed part of projects of political patronage and display.

Two suites of related developments appear in the fourth millennium BC in Central Mediterranean and in Europe as a whole. One is monumentalization of the landscape, evident in new kinds of sites: rock art, rock-cut tombs, statue-stelae installations, and megaliths. In varied local forms, monumentalization created landscapes of memory oriented around local origins, ancestors, and probably kinship. The other development is having new material objects, notably metals and weaponry, accompany new forms of burial, thereby presenting an individual with status-coded grave goods. But what is not present is equally important. Ritual systems imply ritual leaders, but there is no evidence that such people served as leaders with generalized capacities. Although there have been sporadic attempts to construe fourth- to third-millennium BC burials as containing “princes” or “chiefs,” burial evidence from Copper Age and Bell Beaker contexts shows much more uniformity than differentiation. Individuals with elaborate burials were more likely firsts among equals with unusual biographical circumstances (Dolfini Reference Dolfini2021). Such burials signal a critical innovation in personhood, demonstrating a generalized political status through gendered display—but not systematic inequality (Dolfini Reference Dolfini2020).

Early and Middle Bronze Age social prominence seems mostly to be about personal display (particularly in death) and about obtaining and circulating the suite of personal objects needed to do so. One relevant question, therefore, is to what extent this display implies any systematic institutionalized inequality. The real inflection point seems to be the later Bronze Age, from the mid- to late second millennium BC onward, when specialized workshops and places for trade, centralized collection of surplus production, imports and consumption of special objects, and a multitiered settlement hierarchy appear patchily in regions such as the terramare of the Po Valley, the Adriatic and southern Italian coasts, and the central Tyrrhenian area (Blake Reference Blake2014). They have been interpreted as signaling the transformation of traditional lineage-based societies into a nascent stratified society organized around bonds between patrons and clients (Cardarelli Reference Cardarelli2015; Cazzella and Recchia Reference Cazzella and Recchia2021; Peroni Reference Peroni1996). Pan-Mediterranean trade networks also appear (Iacono et al. Reference Iacono, Borgna, Cattani, Cavazzuti, Dawson, Galanakis and Gori2022). Even so, such communities remained small and were based on face-to-face interactions among close-knit communities; their “elites” may have actually been ordinary people who were prominent in local kin segments (Vanzetti Reference Vanzetti, Meller and Bertemes2010, cited in Cardarelli Reference Cardarelli2015:173). It is only well into the first millennium BC in specific regions such as the Central Tyrrhenian that distinctions between “elite” and “non-elite” residences appear, along with potential differences in basic consumption, funerary segregation, and the ideological celebration of individuals or groups.

We can draw two principal conclusions for the prehistoric Central Mediterranean. First, for most of the people most of the time, some elements of social distinction were present, but they did not form the dominant principle of social organization. Indeed, if we turned the question around and ask, equally assiduously, Is there evidence for social equality? we would come up with a much more resounding “yes.” Trying to arrive at a single prehistory of inequality based on places where we feel it can be clearly discerned obscures the great diversity of experiences and historical pathways.

Second, social distinction changes its nature throughout prehistory. In some periods, it is manifest mostly in ritual knowledge or leadership of collective projects; in others, in the display of valuable personal items and embodiment of the ideals they symbolize; and in still others, in the accumulation of wealth and the control of economic infrastructure. In other words, inequality always formed one qualitatively defined element among others in a changing, heterogeneous system of social reproduction.

Prehistoric Europe: Outline of a People’s History

These insights direct us to conceptualize an alternative history of inequality—and of equality. A big-picture, bottom-up prehistory of both the Central Mediterranean and Europe more generally reveals how equality was actively maintained over millennia.

The Age of Mobility. Ethnographically, foragers often resolve conflicts simply by living in small, highly mobile groups that fission easily when tensions build up (Kelly Reference Kelly2013). Mobility effectively limits the accumulation of material differences and the potential for coercion. No doubt, there were social inequalities in Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic Europe (Pettitt Reference Pettitt and Moreau2020; Schulting et al. Reference Schulting, Henderson, Czermak, Zarina, Zagorska, Lee-Thorp and Moreau2020), but they were limited in scope, probably by mobility and social sanctions. The result is an archaeological record characterized by small, short-term campsites (such as Pincevent and Star Carr, to name famous examples), cave occupations, and lithic scatters, evidencing millennia of stable, resilient forager life. This stability would be facilitated by the general practice, in all but rare inhumations, of dissolving the dead into the landscape, rather than preserving their memory. Perhaps relatedly, in Upper Paleolithic art at sites such as Lascaux and Altamira, there are virtually no representations showing humans hunting animals, in contrast to Bronze and Iron Age farmers’ art in southern Scandinavia and Alpine Italy, which frequently depicts individual hunters in action. This may reflect a strategy of spreading credit for hunting success among members of a group, rather than favoring potentially divisive individual boasting (see also Lee Reference Lee1979).

Internal Tensions and the Spread of the Neolithic. Perhaps the defining feature of the initial spread of farming through Europe is its remarkable speed. Impressed and Cardial Ware settlement spread along the Mediterranean coastline from the Adriatic to the Atlantic in about 500 years (6000–5500 BC). The expansion of Linear Pottery culture (LBK) across northern Europe between Poland and France took about the same time (5500–5000 BCE). Although aDNA evidence has clarified that the initial Neolithic spread involved both the expansion of Near Eastern populations and the integration of local hunter-gatherers, the mechanism was not a “wave of advance” that saturated the landscape demographically; instead, it was a rapid, targeted “leapfrog” or “enclave” expansion (Bogucki Reference Bogucki and Price2000; Robb Reference Robb2013; Zilhão Reference Zilhão and Price2000). Villages budded off new settlements readily, targeting the next available patch of a highly selected environment. What has never been explained is why they did so: What social mechanism drove such rapid fissioning?

Sedentism opens up new possibilities for social division (Zilhão Reference Zilhão and Price2000); people tethered to places, crops, and labor investments cannot move away flexibly as social tensions build up. In Zilhão’s model, Early Neolithic villages were unstable, prone to increasing internal tensions and conflicts, perhaps generationally or over rights to land. Inevitably, a village would fission, with a faction establishing its own settlement in available land close by. In a lightly occupied landscape, the faction could target its preferred environment selectively. What held groups together was not political mechanisms but cultural uniformity, the shared habitus visible in the remarkably homogeneous LBK and Impressed Ware material culture. Groups may also have been integrated without hierarchy by collective projects such as digging a village ditch or raising the massive timbers of a longhouse. The result would be a chain of small, identical settlements snaking rapidly from coastal plain to coastal plain or from river terrace to river terrace. Thus, the unrecognized motor of the Neolithic spread was villages fissioning to discourage the internal buildup of tensions or hierarchy.

The “Missing Millennium” of the Neolithic: Radical Heterarchy and the Ritual Mode of Production. Social evolutionary accounts often fast-forward through the middle and later Neolithic, a period when apparently little of importance happens. Yet “ordinary village life” is full of cultural politics and counterpolitics. Moving away from social problems only works when land is freely available. As the Neolithic matures and landscapes infill, other strategies develop.

The signature of middle- to later Neolithic politics is radical heterarchy: we can identify multiple arenas that could potentially be harnessed to power-play agendas but instead are maintained as separate spheres of value. Gardening and herding were important skills. But the limiting factor on how much food people produced and accumulated was not ecological or technological but social, as people worked to meet socially defined needs (Halstead Reference Halstead, Halstead and O’Shea1989); in such small-scale groups in which security ultimately derived from social relationships, not wealth, it is likely that norms of sharing and reciprocity and sanctions such as ostracism curbed overproduction for political gain. In crafting throughout Neolithic Europe, we find expertly made things. Pottery repertories include vessels made with visible, even ostentatious skill: pots were precisely thinned, flawlessly burnished, and ornately decorated. Such products were probably made by recognized practitioners prominent in local communities of practice. But these were “specialists” without patrons; skill was exercised for its own sake, not to make “prestige goods” yoked to political projects. In many regions such as Middle Neolithic southern Italy, highly local styles proliferated. Stylistically, most Neolithic pottery involved producing not identical, competitively evaluated products but creating difference through the creative recombination of a decorative repertory to create styles, substyles, and local micro-styles that would have been legible at multiple levels down to the individual practitioner. It was a material culture that created heterarchical relations (Robb Reference Robb2007).

Trade provides a parallel example. Neolithic trade systems moved stone axes from the Alps to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, spondylus shell from the Black Sea or Aegean to Germany, and obsidian more than 1,000 km from its sources on Mediterranean islands. Axes were used both practically and ritually; they must have been displayed, discussed, and caressed (Pétrequin and Pétrequin Reference Pétrequin and Pétrequin1993). Spondylus shell rings were used to construct diverse, decentralized, enchained social relationalities (Chapman and Gaydarska Reference Chapman and Gaydarska2007). Trade in such objects created social relations, yet none involved clear hierarchies. We have little idea why people wanted obsidian; it had no clear functional use, nor was it deposited in special contexts or involved with projects of identity (for instance, the presentation of self in burials; Robb Reference Robb2007). As with crafting, trade produced valuables and value for diverse, unlinked social projects.

Ritual was pervasive in Neolithic societies. Burial involved diverse, complex processes to reconstitute the moral community on a spiritual plane and cope with varied circumstances of death. Neolithic groups had always had collective building projects that integrated communities; for instance, making village ditches or palisades. When they began to make large ritual constructions, such as northern European enclosures at Sarup, Denmark, and Goseck, Germany, in the fifth to fourth millennia BC, this opened a new arena of social action. Ritual leaders curated valuable knowledge and managed large projects. In a society without developed coercive powers, such leaders must have led as long as they could motivate a constituency and within the limits granted them by their constituency.

This usefully frames the social role of ritual. Large collective projects were not the leader’s project, they were “our project”: the construction of monuments built communities. The same was true of feasting events; someone coordinating surplus and administering a feast may have been more a servant than a master. Provisioning work parties and feasts may have been a form of forced sharing to keep leaders poor or dependent on their constituents. The lack of evidence for the collection and administration of surplus, differential consumption, and mortuary commemoration of individuals all underlines how specialized ritual authority provided a narrow, not generalized, domain of authority. The trajectories of individual ritual systems give a sense of the boundaries of such a world. Ritual cycles of 200 to 500 years show continual tinkering by the local Megalith Committee as a group worked through an envelope of possibilities. Occasionally—in Stonehenge, Avebury, Carnac, and Malta—a system would go supernova, but even large works may not imply rigid hierarchies (Cazzella and Recchia Reference Cazzella and Recchia2015). The limiting factor is political structure: the larger the system, the more fragile it becomes, and they do not remain at their extended peaks for long.

Overall, Neolithic Europe exemplifies the “ritual mode of production” (Spielmann Reference Spielmann2002): politics, trade, and crafting served the needs of ritual and social reproduction, rather than their serving politics. Norms of Neolithic culture and the heterarchical distribution of knowledge and authority discouraged any one field of action from controlling others or providing a platform for domination. Many Neolithic fields of action channeled social energy into projects of knowledge, creativity, skill, social reproduction, and identity—but they all remained different projects, ends in themselves rather than reduced to a political functionalism of some generalized structure.

Ancestors and the Ambiguity of Kinship. Monuments are not merely big constructions to be project-managed; they create landscapes of memory and relationships based on shared ancestry. This became widespread in different forms throughout fourth- to third-millennia BC Europe. This may have emphasized the rise of kinship as a major principle of group identity. As production changed with innovations in plowing and herding, an increasing emphasis on kinship may have helped assemble people into larger formations to meet the needs of an increasingly diversified use of landscape.

Here it is worth noting the inherent political ambiguity of kinship (see also Cardarelli Reference Cardarelli2015:156). Kinship creates relations of shared identity, solidarity, and mutual support. At the same time, it also provides ranked oppositions: elders versus juniors, lineal versus affinal kin, and central or senior lineages versus peripheral or junior lineages. Kin relations thus always contain the potential for both equality and inequality. However, kinship provides a flexible rather than deterministic system. People participate in multiple kin relationships and continually reshape their genealogies and memories creatively. In this period, on balance, kinship seems to swing much more toward equality and solidarity than toward internal distinction, as suggested by the mostly uniform burial treatment and merging bodily substance in tombs. People could vote with their feet and change allegiance if they felt that kin group leaders overstepped or were unresponsive to their needs.

Display, Feasting, and Bronze Age Collectivities: “Kings,” “Chiefs,” or Farmers-and-Kinsfolk-in-Chief? New idioms of politics emerge in the Bronze Age. The most obvious one is individual display. Recurrent combinations of objects characterized males and females. These included things worn on the body (ornaments, clothing, armor), things habitually associated with it (weapons, knives, and spindle whorls), and things related to consumption (food and drink habits and paraphernalia; Robb and Harris Reference Robb and Harris2013). Such objects are known mostly from burials, but iconography and use wear suggest that people also used them habitually in life. The warrior was a particular form of social display (Harding Reference Harding2015). Such assemblages are sometimes interpreted as evidencing the “origins of patriarchy” (Kristiansen and Larsson Reference Kristiansen and Larsson2005), but clearly, Bronze Age gender and potential gender inequality were much more complex than any simple reading: there were distinct, complementary male and female repertories, and within each there was the potential for both solidarity and distinction. Such widespread, ordinary objects provided a diffuse, habitual idiom of comparative personhood that mostly expressed social adequacy rather than prominence, but which less common, upscale versions (sometimes including materials such as gold) built on. Thus, access to everyday objects one could obtain and display was central to social distinction in this period. Ostentatious burial, participating in commensality, and providing leadership in feasts and warfare may also have been important.

Narratives of Bronze Age inequality focus on infrequent, rich burials, but in such small-scale, face-to-face societies, the most important limited resource for work, security, and personhood was people: real social capital lay not in the gleaming objects that fascinate us but in the social relationships these objects negotiated, symbolized, or hid. How did display and performative personhood fit into an overall social formation? Almost nowhere in Bronze Age Europe outside the Aegean is there evidence for the large-scale centralized storage and control of produce or for the accumulation of wealth beyond personal display objects. Nor is there evidence that “elites” lived much differently than anybody else; for instance, the glorious picture of the Argaric Bronze Age afforded by burial evidence is not substantiated in other spheres (Gilman Reference Gilman, Berrocal, Sanjuán and Gilman2013). aDNA analysis of Bronze Age burials shows possible differentiation between more important and less important lineages (Mittnik et al. Reference Mittnik, Massy, Knipper, Wittenborn, Friedrich, Pfrengle and Burri2019; Žegarac et al. Reference Žegarac, Winkelbach, Blöcher, Diekmann, Gavrilović, Porčić and Stojković2021) but among people living closely together in very small groups and sharing most conditions of life. By and large, rather than heroic “kings,” we might imagine such people as central members of kin-based extended rural families. Whether they were goading the plow oxen or spreading manure, they lived in the same farmhouses, ate the same food, and thought about the same tasks as everybody else.

In such a social landscape, informal cooperation, reputation, and gossip, not abstract institutionalized roles, would have been vital. This constrained and directed potential inequality:

• • Display is a self-limiting form of differentiation. There is a limit to how many shining objects one can hang on one’s body. Ethnographies of face-to-face societies often note valuable objects such as headdresses being collective property, borrowed, or even hired for an occasion, rather than closely associated with individuals. When ostentatious consumption involves putting valuables beyond reach, as in watery hoards, a pan-European Bronze Age innovation (Bradley Reference Bradley, Fokkens and Harding2013), or in burials, they pass out of possession, resetting levels of wealth accumulation. Indeed, depositing such attributes so they could not be retrieved may have been a leveling mechanism to limit their use as ongoing economic assets of a dominant family or faction.

• • Whose mound or feast was it? The assumption that a burial event or monument refers principally to an individual inhumed within it, rather than the group making or performing it, treats a sectional point of view as exclusive and universal. People may have felt that a mound or feast represented “our group,” rather than a particular protagonist; Metcalf and Huntington (Reference Metcalf and Huntington1991) provide a classic ethnographic cautionary tale in which an Indonesian group wanting to stage an elaborate funerary feast used the death of an insignificant, peripheral member as a convenient occasion for it. Similarly, although feasts provide a means by which ambitious leaders can attain prominence (Dietler and Hayden Reference Dietler, Hayden, Dietler and Hayden2001), ethnographic accounts suggest that organizing them involves a huge amount of work and that the feast may be seen as “belonging” not to the organizer but to the group contributing the resources.

• • Leaders were tied to members of their household and group by bonds of kinship, history, and close daily cooperation; “non-elites” had claims of solidarity, obligation, and a stake in collective enterprises. It may be an unflattering self-commentary that we picture leaders as perceiving followers principally as a source of labor and production, rather than as objects of familiarity, affection, loyalty, or responsibility. Collective identities may have worked in very concrete ways; for instance, herds may have been considered not as unrestricted individual property but as belonging to a kin group that had to collectively approve how animals were managed and consumed.

• • Leader–follower bonds may have provided the ultimate factor curbing Bronze Age leaders’ ambitions. Aspiring leaders needed to perform leadership, including generosity—something that may have kept successful leaders poor or, at least, circulating wealth rather than accumulating it. Maintaining such bonds may have motivated institutions of conviviality (and the resulting ceramic assemblages). If a leader did not treat a client well, he risked not only the client’s withdrawal of support but also “reputational damage” and disaffection from others. It may be relevant that many Bronze Age settlements were short-lived and relatively insubstantial rather than requiring substantial investment in houses and facilities; people may have kept open the option of moving to other groups as a check on social control.

Such considerations suggest that Bronze Age display does not represent a stable, entrenched system of inequality. Rather, it may have been a functionally egalitarian world, with the display of bling providing an index of a leader’s salience and ability to deliver services, as well as a personification of a group’s well-being. Moreover, if Bronze Age display was a politico-economic game for attaining status—rather than, say, a way of performing a specific culturally constituted idea of personhood—it operated within strong social constraints. In a small social world of personal relationships, conceptualizing the relationships that constructed leadership as an instrumental “masking” ideology intended to deceive may be alien to how the participants themselves—both leaders and followers—would have experienced it. Instead, the social order would have emerged from a negotiation of interests, some sectional and some collective, in a way not easily classifiable as “egalitarian” or “hierarchical.”

The Iron Age continued Bronze Age trends, although the level of ostentatious display often decreased, undercutting any narrative of a continual increase in inequality. In much of Europe, much larger cemeteries suggest that communities increased in size, and this may have placed strains on kinship as an integrating idiom. In some cemeteries—for instance, Osteria dell’Osa (Bietti Sestieri Reference Sestieri and Maria1992)—there may be emerging differentiation between central and peripheral members of a kin group. There is also evidence for slavery in some areas, which provided another route to recruiting subordinate labor (Arnold Reference Arnold, Blair Gibson and Geselowitz1988). Stable isotopes show that in some cases, people buried with “elite” treatment may have consumed diets with more animal protein (Knipper et al. Reference Knipper, Meyer, Jacobi, Roth, Fecher, Stephan and Schatz2014; Le Huray and Schutkowski Reference Huray, Jonathan and Schutkowski2005). If kinship was associated with economic production, this may have opened an exit route into a world in which inequality was increasingly based on the accumulation and control of economic resources by central members of the productive unit (Cardarelli Reference Cardarelli2015; Cazzella and Recchia Reference Cazzella and Recchia2021; Pacciarelli Reference Pacciarelli2001, Reference Pacciarelli2016; Peroni Reference Peroni1996).

Thus, archaeologically less ostentatious Iron Age societies may have been more susceptible to inequality, because it could have been entrenched in the low-key control of productive resources, rather than performed individually. Even so, these remained small-scale, face-to-face societies, and negotiation and the power of the collectivity must have still been important. For example, forming towns was not inevitable or obviously advantageous but must have been contingent on the consent of the people deciding to join or withdraw from them (Jinoh Kim, personal communication 2024). As a recent general review highlights, much of Iron Age Europe may have worked on heterarchical principles (Moore Reference Moore, Haselgrove, Rebay-Salisbury and Wells2023). Even the most apparently hierarchical hillforts, “elite” burials, and proto-urban sites may actually be evidence of horizontally organized communities (Arnold Reference Arnold, Timothy and Fernández-Götz2021; Moore and González-Álvarez Reference Moore, González-Álvarez, Timothy and Fernández-Götz2021).

Colonialism and Equality? A generation of postcolonial archaeology has explored how Europeans creatively managed the colonial encounter with Mycenaeans, Greeks, Phoenicians, and, later, the Romans (Dietler Reference Dietler2010; Hodos Reference Hodos2020; Mac Sweeney et al. Reference Mac Sweeney, Sánchez, Kotsonas, Waiman-Barak, Osborne, López-Ruiz and Hodos2023; van Dommelen Reference Van Dommelen, Tilley, Keane, Küchler, Rowlands and Spyer2006; Woolf Reference Woolf1997). Responses to colonialism were remarkably varied. Around the Central Mediterranean, for example, they included simply opting out of contact with traders or colonizers; incorporating foreign techniques into local production (for instance, making “Mycenaean” pottery in southern Italy); dictating market conditions that traders conformed to; integrating foreign items and customs selectively into local practices; maintaining multiple or mixed political and cultural identities, often through intermarriage; and living on the margins of colonial systems or in the interstices of state attention to benefit from new opportunities while evading control.

What has been less explored is how this intersected with equality and inequality. Many Iron Age societies became more hierarchical in the period of intense contact with colonizing groups; the Iron Age II sees the rapid formation of class-based urban societies in Tyrrhenian Italy, Sicily, Puglia, and elsewhere. However, it may be simplistic to blame social stratification on colonial contact. Colonialism may have presented different challenges and opportunities for people in different structural positions. Responses to it may have been aimed as much at curbing the growth of power within indigenous societies as at preventing encapsulation or subjugation by the foreign. Central questions include the following:

• • Did local groups set the terms of contact to limit the growth of indigenous elites; for instance, insisting that a would-be leader had to work through traditional, local forms of relationships and authority?

• • Did colonialism undercut traditional forms of hierarchy; for instance, by making exotic goods formerly circulated through elite networks more widely available or by introducing new forms of value?

• • Did colonial contact afford new opportunities; for instance, for economic participation independent of local relationships and developing urban settings as places where one could fashion new identities?

• • Were “Greek,” “Roman,” or “local” not primordial terms of identity but instead created or heightened in particular settings, perhaps in ways that undercut local forms of distinction?

• • Did colonialism create frontier zones that could act as preserves of equality; for instance, zones of state inattention, areas of flexible identities, and places of escape?

Colonial encounters may have simultaneously expanded inequality and created new possibilities for resisting it. Exactly how is a problem yet to be investigated.