Poverty and Plenty in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic

later Historical Archaeologies of Material Excess and Scarcity

Lucas, Gavin (ed.) (...)

Examining the archaeological material of the modern period, over a period of the last 500 years, this open access book presents a series of case studies that challenges the fallacy of Nordic egalitarianism. The widening gap between rich and poor Western countries is now a well-known phenomenon and, while Scandinavia has often been hailed as one of the regions where inequality has been the lowest, even here a similar trend toward widening inequality has been observed.
The topic of inequality has long been a major focus of interest within archaeology, but the goal and novelty of this volume is to start with the problem of material disparity by asking what this means, rather than starting with the problem of social inequality and trying to map observable material disparities onto its various conceptualizations. Key themes include variations between urban and rural contexts, as well as geographical proximity to centres of commerce and industry, different local/cultural valuations of – especially consumer – goods and discard practices. The result is an original study of a wealth of material culture that tells us how extensive this inequality actually was and the different ways it appeared in various societies.