The workshop will address social inequality and resource exploitation across different historical periods, from the Neolithic to the present day. Its primary aim is to undertake a diachronic comparison of the relationship between access to resources and the development of social and political inequalities, with particular attention to mechanisms by which specific resources―their extraction, circulation, and control―structure economic and social hierarchies.

Contributions engage with two interconnected dimensions:

• unequal or restricted access to key resources within societies, particularly the control of such resources by dominant social groups or classes, and the role of this control as a central economic factor in the emergence and consolidation of social inequality; and
• supra-regional inequalities between societies possessing different types and quantities of resources, and the ways in which these disparities shape their economic and political relationships.

A particular focus will be placed on the often-paradoxical relationship between producers and beneficiaries: those who extract or process resources are not necessarily those who accumulate wealth, and this dissociation between production and consumption proves to be a recurrent pattern across very different historical and geographical contexts.

The workshop brings together scholars working across a broad chronological and geographical spectrum — from prehistoric Europe to the ancient Near East and Egypt, including the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean — and combining archaeological analysis with archaeometric data and quantitative approaches to the study of social inequality. On the eve of the workshop, a guided visit to the Technisches Museum Wien and its exhibition on resources and labour will extend this reflection to the modern and contemporary world, grounding the long-term diachronic perspective in present-day realities.