WEALTH INEQUALITY AND THE PRISTINE HAWAIIAN STATE: A POLITICAL ECONOMY APPROACH

Archaeology provides a unique long-term perspective on the emergence of inequality, suggesting that social complexity can be organized based on alternative economic structures. To understand inequality, requires an analysis of the political economy and its diverse currencies used to create power differentials. Importantly, conspicuous consumption of wealth items, so evident in modern capitalism, is not generally a good measure of inequality in complex societies, especially in cases where the primary source of power is based on the mobilization of staples (not commodities). As illustrated by the Hawaiian case, the engineering of the landscapes for irrigation systems, fishponds and the like created a system of property over highly productive lands. By exercising ownership rights, elites controlled commoner labor and staple flows to finance ruling institutions. With this perspective, ownership of land as materialized in the built landscape best measures the nature of inequality in such staple-financed chiefdoms and states. This helps resolve the apparent contradiction seen by archaeologist, whereby societies able to organize social labor in construction often have little evidence of wealth inequality in burial inventories or household assemblages.