Old Systems
Achieving Equality: Why There Was Not as Much Inequality in Prehistoric Europe as We Imagine
John Robb
American Antiquity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Archaeologists have long investigated the rise of inequality in prehistoric Europe. I argue that images of steadily increasing inequality are usually based on cherry-picking outstanding cases and selectively interpreting the results. Based on a large-scale qualitative assessment of the Central Mediterranean, I make two claims. First, a broad review of evidence suggests that social inequality was not a major organizing principle of most prehistoric societies. Instead, throughout prehistory, inequality formed part of a heterogeneous, heterarchical social order. Second, this was not simply due to historical chance or stagnation. As my outline of the "people's history" of prehistoric Europe suggests, many of the archaeologically most visible developments in every period were actively aimed at undermining, encapsulating, or directing the potential development of hierarchy. In this sense, Europe's long prehistory of limited and ambiguous hierarchy does not represent a failure of social evolution but rather widespread success in developing tactics for maintaining equality.
Athens, Rome, and the Political Economy of Ancient Assemblies
John Matsusaka
University of Southern California Working Paper, August 2025
Abstract:
Citizen assemblies were the core institution of the democracies of the ancient Mediterranean world. Assemblies had the power to make laws and elect magistrates. These assemblies have been widely criticized by both ancient and modern observers for making poor decisions, but the reasons they would have done so are not well understood. This paper develops a public choice model of ancient assemblies to illuminate the challenges they faced and explain why their decisions may not have enjoyed popular support. The model assumes that policy conflicts stem from different preferences between urban and rural citizens, and that voting was more costly for rural than urban citizens because of travel costs. In this framework, ancient assemblies faced a structural challenge of preventing urban masses from dominating the much more numerous citizens in the countryside. The model provides a method to quantify the amount of policy distortion compared to perfect majority rule. I analyze different institutions that ancient democracies used to manage the representation problem, in particular, Athens' program to pay citizens to attend, and Rome's use of a unique group voting system.
Frontier walls, labour energetics and Qin imperial collapse
Zehao Li et al.
Journal of Archaeological Science, September 2025
Abstract:
The imperial northern frontiers of China during the Qin and Han Dynasties were protected by large-scale defensive walls. This paper considers the colossal investment of direct labour and logistics behind these constructions in the last few centuries BCE. Drawing upon new fieldwork, 3D recordings and an ethnohistorical meta-analysis, we develop an architectural energetic model for different construction methods and workforce sustenance. Our estimates highlight the significant logistical challenges, suggesting that the Qin Empire's mass conscription, forced relocations, and nationwide resource mobilisation potentially contributed to its collapse by 210 BCE.
AI-ming backwards: Vanishing archaeological landscapes in Mesopotamia and automatic detection of sites on CORONA imagery
Alessandro Pistola et al.
PLoS ONE, August 2025
Abstract:
By upgrading an existing deep learning model with the knowledge provided by one of the oldest sets of grayscale satellite imagery, known as CORONA, we improved the AI model's attitude towards the automatic identification of archaeological sites in an environment which has been completely transformed in the last five decades, including the complete destruction of many of those same sites. The initial Bing-based convolutional network model was re-trained using CORONA satellite imagery for the district of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, central Mesopotamian floodplain. The results were twofold and surprising. First, the detection precision obtained on the area of interest increased sensibly: in particular, the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) values, at the image segmentation level, surpassed 85%, while the general accuracy in detecting archeological sites reached 90%. Second, our re-trained model allowed the identification of four new sites of archaeological interest (confirmed through field verification), previously not identified by archaeologists with traditional techniques. This has confirmed the efficacy of using AI techniques and the CORONA imagery from the 1960s to discover archaeological sites currently no longer visible, a concrete breakthrough with significant consequences for the study of landscapes with vanishing archaeological evidence induced by anthropization.
The MUC19 gene: An evolutionary history of recurrent introgression and natural selection
Fernando Villanea et al.
Science, 21 August 2025
Abstract:
We study the gene MUC19, for which some modern humans carry a Denisovan-like haplotype. MUC19 is a mucin, a glycoprotein that forms gels with various biological functions. We find diagnostic variants for the Denisovan-like MUC19 haplotype at high frequencies in admixed American individuals and at highest frequency in 23 ancient Indigenous American individuals, all pre-dating population admixture with Europeans and Africans. We find that the Denisovan-like MUC19 haplotype is under positive selection and carries a higher copy number of a 30-base-pair variable number tandem repeat, and that copy numbers of this repeat are exceedingly high in admixed American populations. Finally, we find that some Neanderthals carry the Denisovan-like MUC19 haplotype, and that it was likely introgressed into modern human populations through Neanderthal introgression rather than Denisovan introgression.