By Lizzie Wade
Between 6000 B.C.E. and 1000 B.C.E., the people living in the Carpathian Basin of central Eastern Europe experienced a whirlwind of social and technological change. The first farmers brought domesticated crops. Smaller communities grew into larger settlements, broke apart, and reformed. New technologies such as plows, draft animals, standard measurements, and metalworking transformed working life. Elsewhere in the ancient world, such changes often heralded increasingly unequal and socially stratified societies. But not in the Carpathian Basin, which covers all of Hungary and stretches to parts of countries including Austria, Serbia, and Ukraine (see map, below). There, house sizes and grave goods suggest societies remained remarkably egalitarian for 5000 years, hinting that people developed social and political strategies that helped them resist inequality, researchers report today in Science Advances.
“There has been a huge expansion of interest in [the origins of inequality] over the last decade,” and archaeologists now have reliable tools to study it, says Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University. Kohler, who wasn’t involved in the new study, co-authored a 2017 Nature paper that used a standard measure of inequality called Gini coefficients to quantify and compare wealth inequality across the ancient world. A society in which each person has the same level of wealth would have a Gini of 0, whereas a Gini of 1 indicates a single person owns all wealth. Real-world examples fall somewhere in between. The World Bank estimates the United States has a Gini coefficient of about 0.42, whereas Norway sits at 0.23. Economists generally use differences in income to calculate present-day Gini coefficients, whereas many archaeologists use differences in house size within a settlement as a proxy for wealth inequality in the past.
Kohler’s 2017 paper found that agricultural societies tended to have higher Gini scores—that is, tended to be less equal than—hunter-gatherer communities, and that the use of draft animals often increased inequality further. Draft animals make plow agriculture easier, which can lead to a small number of people profiting from farming large tracts of land. Animals can also be passed from generation to generation, leading to heritable wealth. In 2017, Kohler’s team found that the use of draft animals was probably the main reason ancient societies in the Eastern Hemisphere tended to be less equal than those in the Americas, which lacked large beasts of burden until the colonial era
Ancient societies in the Carpathian Basin started farming around 6000 B.C.E. and likely adopted plow agriculture around 3500 B.C.E. But when Paul Duffy, an archaeologist at Kiel University, and colleagues pulled together data from 110 sites in the region and calculated house-size–based Gini coefficients for most of them, they found the average score didn’t budge even as technology changed, hovering around an average of 0.21 for 5000 years. The Gini coefficients of cemeteries, where inequality can be expressed through lavish offerings in the graves of select few elites, also showed little change over this time period. V. Penney/Science
Across similar time periods in places such as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, inequality rose along with the development of plow agriculture. So, why didn’t that happen in the Carpathian Basin? One likely reason, says Amy Bogaard, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who wasn’t involved with the study, was that land was readily available there. Her recent work, some with Kohler since 2017, has shown that using draft animals for plow agriculture typically only increases inequality in societies where land is scarce. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, farming is confined to river valleys. “There’s nothing about the plow that inherently causes land limitation,” Bogaard says.
Bogaard says many of the Carpathian Basin societies appear instead to be what she calls “labor-limited.” In labor-limited societies, commoners upset over a leader who demands too much of their time can simply move elsewhere, as there is plenty of available space. Indeed, Duffy says, people in the Carpathian Basin frequently “voted with their feet” by leaving existing communities and forming new ones.
Although Duffy’s team found that average inequality didn’t change over time, the later cemeteries do show a wider gap between the people who had the most and those who had the least. But those later sites also tended to be the shortest lived, lasting for only about 300 years whereas earlier settlements tended to last for as long as 800 years. Perhaps, Duffy suggests, “When faced with leaders trying to take more authority and impose hierarchies, people are saying, ‘No, we don’t want to be a part of that.’”
Equality may also have been maintained by social elites’ custom of taking their wealth to the grave, Duffy says. Luxury items entombed with a person may point to their high status in life, but grave goods can’t be inherited by their descendants, taking that wealth out of circulation.
Duffy adds that the history of the Carpathian Basin can provide an anecdote to the idea that today’s yawning wealth inequality and social hierarchy are inevitable. “There have been so many alternatives that people have come up with, and [in the Carpathian Basin] they were able to resist this tendency for so long,” he says. “I think that’s worth remembering.
About the author
Lizzie Wade
Lizzie Wade is a contributing correspondent for Science based in Mexico City. She covers archaeology and anthropology, with a focus on the Americas. Her work for Science has won awards from the Society for American Archaeology and the American Geophysical Union, and her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center. Lizzie is the author of the book Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures (Harper, 2025). Her work has also appeared in Archaeology, Slate, Smithsonian, The New York Times, and Wired, among others.
Courtesy of Science
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