Social inequality among Neolithic fisher-foragers: Statistical analysis of grave goods from three Pitted Ware Culture cemeteries on Gotland, Sweden

How was burial wealth distributed within a Neolithic fisher-forager society? This paper explores this question by analyzing the distribution of burial goods at three different Middle Neolithic Pitted Ware Culture (PWC) cemeteries located on Gotland, Sweden, dating to c. 3000–2300 BCE. Specifically, our dataset consists of 40 burials from Visby, 51 burials from Ajvide, and 51 burials from Västerbjers. We show that absolute Gini values for these cemeteries range between 7 and 24.3, with relative Gini values ranging between 0.45 and 0.57. We compare these values with those from the agropastoral Bohemian and Moravian Corded Ware Culture (c. 2900 to 2300 BCE and c. 2700 to 2200 BCE respectively) and a Hungarian Baden culture cemetery (c. 3350–2900 BCE). Our results indicate that fisher-forager PWC cemeteries displayed levels of relative and absolute inequality on par with those of contemporaneous Neolithic agricultural communities, suggesting that increases in wealth inequality during the Neolithic in Northern Europe were not exclusive to agricultural societies. Furthermore, we show that there was considerable variability in burial wealth display between sites, suggesting the potential for a settlement hierarchy on Gotland during the Middle Neolithic.