4 ms·
The article goes out of its way to characterize such ancient sites through the lens of our current culture. This kind of archeo-sociology is nothing more than a
by Jupe 2y ago
The article goes out of its way to characterize such ancient sites through the lens of our current culture. This kind of archeo-sociology is nothing more than a massive guess as to what was actually going on. There are simply too many possible reasons for different house sizes. The most obvious, to me, is household (family) size. There may, or may not, be a relationship between household size and social level, but I do not see how this would ever be understood from these sites.
Jumping to "household income" seems too much for me, given nothing more than house size.
Example (from the article):
"In addition, poorer households are prone to lose members to richer households, have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates..."
This is certainly a more modern perspective and not something I'd associate with a pastoral community like this.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I view such articles with a huge amount of skepticism.
- digging 2y agoDo you have a specific response to this? > Based on the results of extensive excavations and geophysical surveys, this article calculates Gini coefficients—a statistical measure of inequality in the distribution of household income—of house floor sizes, which have been shown to be a suitable proxy for evaluating household variability in diverse cultural contexts and in global comparative studies (e.g. Kohler et al. Reference Kohler2017; Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Feinman and Prufer2021; Basri & Lawrence Reference Basri and Lawrence2020). Otherwise it seems like you're pushing your own preferred interpretation onto data you don't understand. I don't agree that the authors went out of their way to characterize the ruins through a lens of our modern society. If they did, they've hidden that from me.