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Lycoming College associate professor of archaeology and anthropology Jessica Munson, Ph.D., recently worked with an interdisciplinary team of researchers to analyze house size distributions from more than 1000 sites around the world covering the last 10,000 years. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), one of the world’s most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals. Munson is co-lead author on the paper, “Assessing neighborhoods, wealth differentials, and perceived inequality in preindustrial societies,” and is a contributing author on six additional articles in this PNAS Special Feature.
The Special Feature, “The Global Dynamics of Economic Inequality Over the Long Term,” is a result of the collaborative GINI (Global Dynamics of Ancient Inequality) research project that brought together archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and economists to compile and analyze a global database of archaeological and ethnographic records capturing measurements of house size. By examining house-size differences as a key measure of wealth, this research tracks patterns of inequality across diverse societies over 10,000 years, offering key insights into societal well-being and longevity.
Munson, along with co-lead author Amy Thompson (University of Texas at Austin) and others, analyzed patterns of neighborhood inequality within more than 80 settlements including some of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, the Classic Maya region, the Central Andes, and the Indus River Basin to better understand how differences in wealth may have been experienced at various spatial scales in the past.
“The key takeaway from our research is that when you zoom in, the neighborhoods and localized communities that people interacted with on a daily basis have lower residential disparity in comparison to the settlement overall,” said Munson. “Across the archaeological record, the lived experience of inequality for most people was generally less pronounced than was the reality across the entire city. Similar to cities today, premodern urban settlements exhibit some degree of economic segregation, and this has important implications for issues of urban sustainability.”
Lycoming College archaeology and Spanish double major Amelia Thompson ’25, assisted Munson with the digitization of several sites included in the GINI database. “I identified each structure based on old site maps and reports and then digitized them by creating polygons on ArcMaps,” said Thompson, who explained that the process included grouping related structures and identifying the type of housing group.
Thompson, who chose to attend Lycoming because of its archaeology program, plans to establish a career in either cultural resource management as a field archaeologist, or in the park service. She added that the research experience with Munson led her to augment her skills in geographic information system software that is frequently utilized in archaeology. “I’ve enjoyed the connections I’ve made here at Lycoming and the opportunities I was able to explore,” she said.
Munson added, “Collaborative synthesis is transforming how we do archaeological research—by compiling extant datasets and bringing together scholars with diverse perspectives and expertise, we are able to collectively generate more compelling narratives about the past than any one scholar could achieve alone. Synthesis projects like the GINI not only yield deeper insights about global inequality over the long-term, but provide important touchpoints that can inform contemporary debates and challenges.”
Lycoming College recently joined Harvard University, Arizona State University, Boston College, and others when it became a partner member of the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis (CfAS). The organization promotes and fosters synthesis in archaeological knowledge and provided initial funding for the GINI project.