UGA Anthropology professor Jennifer Birch is a featured author in a special feature in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Economic Inequality Over the Very Long Term, which brings together a large team of international experts to examine wealth disparities over the past 10,000 years using archaeological and ethnographic data. Co-authoring four of the eleven featured articles, Birch offers a specialized perspective on Indigenous societies in eastern North America, drawing from her extensive research on settlement patterns and village structures. Her additional data is essential to the project's global analysis of house-size inequality. The findings challenge assumptions that extreme wealth inequality is inevitable, showing instead that it often arose from local pressures on land and the absence of equitable governance. Birch highlights examples like Teotihuacan in Mexico and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus River Basin, where governance helped mitigate inequality. She notes that amplifying the cultural history of the Eastern Woodlands has always been central to her scholarship. The project also includes contributions from UGA anthropology alumnus Benjamin Steere (Ph.D. ’11), now department head at Western Carolina University, and Franklin College students, who helped compile household data and presented early findings at the 2024 Society for American Archaeology conference (Flurry, 2025). Image: Still photo from drone video by Jonny Miller of Durban South Africa, via The Guardian.
