The creation of inequality : how our prehistoric ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire /
Overview: Our early ancestors lived in small groups and worked actively to preserve social equality. As they created larger societies, however, inequality rose, and by 2500 BCE truly egalitarian societies were on the wane. In The Creation of Inequality, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus demonstrate tha...
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| Imprint: |
Cambridge, Mass. :
Harvard University Press,
2012.
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| Format: | Electronic |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: |
Table of Contents:
- part 1. Starting out equal
- Genesis and exodus
- Rousseau's "state of nature"
- Ancestors and enemies
- Why our ancestors had religion and the arts
- Inequality without agriculture
- part 2. Balancing prestige and equality
- Agriculture and achieved renown
- The ritual buildings of achievement-based societies
- The prehistory of the ritual house
- Prestige and equality in four Native American societies
- part 3. Societies that made inequality hereditary
- The rise and fall of hereditary inequality in farming societies
- Three sources of power in chiefly societies
- From ritual house to temple in the Americas
- Aristocracy without chiefs
- Temples and inequality in early Mesopotamia
- The chiefly societies in our backyard
- How to turn rank into stratification : tales of the South Pacific
- part 4. Inequality in kingdoms and empires
- How to create a kingdom
- Three of the New World's first-generation kingdoms
- The land of the scorpion king
- Black ox hides and golden stools
- The nursery of civilization
- Graft and imperialism
- How new empires learn from old
- part 5. Resisting inequality
- Inequality and natural law.