Abstract
•The Gini index is used to measure differentiation in house size as a proxy to interpret inequality across a large environmental lidar dataset that documented a palimpsest of Maya archaeological settlement and landscapes.•We identify consistent patterns and Gini coefficients across the Maya lowlands, with notably lower values in peripheral areas, including coastal zones and the Western lowlands.•Despite the narrow lidar transects, the results of this study align with regional and site-based approaches across the Maya area.
The emergence and expansion of inequality have been topics of household archaeology for decades. Traditionally, this question has been informed by ethnographic, ethnohistoric and/or comparative studies. Within sites and regions, comparative physical, spatial, and architectural studies of households offer an important baseline of information about status, wealth, and well-being, especially in the Maya lowlands where households are accessible in the archaeological record. Between sites, more research is necessary to assess how these physical measurements of household remains compare. This paper investigates the intersection of landscape, household, and community based on a multi-scalar analysis of households using the Gini index across southeastern Mexico, in the context of a broader study of land use, land management, and settlement patterns. Notably, this paper represents a region-wide analysis of nearly continuous LiDAR data within and outside of previously documented prehispanic Maya settlements. While we conclude that the Gini index is useful for establishing a comparative understanding of settlement, we also recognize that the index is a starting point to identify other ways to study how household to community-level social and economic variability intersects with diverse ecological patterns. Highlighting the opportunities and limitations with applying measures like the Gini index across culturally, temporally, and geographically heterogeneous areas, we illustrate how systematic studies of settlement can be coupled to broader studies of landscape archaeology to interpret changing patterns of land management and settlement across the Maya lowlands.
