Capital in the First Century: The Evolution of Inequality in Ancient Maya Society

We investigated the evolution of inequality in ancient Maya society using the sizes of houses as a proxy for household wealth. We used several mathematical and statistical methods to study the distribution of wealth at four major archaeological sites in the Maya lowlands: Komchén, Palenque, Sayil, and Mayapán. We calculated the Gini coefficient and the probability density function of the distribution of the house sizes as a measure of the wealth distribution at each site. We found that the wealth distributions had some characteristics of an approximate power law at all the sites, yet the exact distributions were statistically different from each other. The results indicate that the evolution of Maya culture across these sites cannot be understood as simply dependent on a monotonic evolution of the wealth distribution with time but should rather be explained by the historical circumstances surrounding each community. Specifically, the analyses show that, before the evolution of urban, state-level society, significant inequality existed in the Late Preclassic period, but a Pareto distribution either had not emerged or was incipient. In the Late and Terminal Classic periods, economic inequality became increasingly pronounced, while in the succeeding Postclassic period inequality ameliorated, although it seems that poverty prevailed.