Distinguishing Between the Conditional Effects of Material Wealth Inequality and “Projected” Household Size on the House Floor Area Distribution in Early Agriculturalists: A Probabilistic Model

Abstract

House size in early agricultural societies is assumed to be mutually conditioned by the “projected” maximal size of a household and its material wealth. This paper presents a probabilistic model distinguishing the impact of these factors on Gini-index inequality estimates derived from the distribution of house floor areas in early agriculturalist groups characterized by a periodic relocation to a new place(s), available construction space within a settlement, and individual houses inhabited by nuclear families. Accordingly, the model is a step towards a large-scale comparative framework with reliable indices of material wealth inequality. In addition, we analyze the impact of population size and settlement span on the variation in house floor areas during three phases of a settlement’s life: formative, developmental, and terminal. The results reveal that during the formative phase of settlement, population structure rather than the population size of the initial settlers is the primary driver of the “projected household size” component of Gini estimates for the analyzed subset of early agriculturalists. Population structure also impacts these estimates in combination with site span in the developmental and terminal phases. The application of the model to a dataset from the Cucuteni-Trypillia mega-site Nebelivka in present-day Ukraine approximates the overwhelming impact of the “projected household size” component on Nebelivka’s time-averaged Gini index.