Domestic architecture is increasingly revisited as a source of data about wealth inequality in the distant past via the Gini coefficient, a statistical tool often used in economics to compare income inequality. Many areas—including South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania—remain under-sampled, making it difficult to develop a more complete picture of ancient political economies. In this paper we present a first look at this measure in the Hawaiian Islands. These data show that during the period prior to contact with Europeans inequality was extremely high, most similar to autocratic archaic states. We also found geographic patterning that may ultimately be linked to dryland (non-irrigated) farming. On islands reliant on dryland farming (Mau‘i, Hawai‘i), we find distinctively less inequality than elsewhere, or larger house sizes. We hypothesize these may have been innovations in how wealth was made visible to create and maintain cooperation in places where more labour would have been required to grow surplus. More research is necessary to test this hypothesis, investigate alternative interpretations, and to put these findings in larger regional context within Polynesia.

国内建筑越来越多地被重新审视为通过基尼系数来了解遥远过去财富不平等的数据来源，基尼系数是经济学中经常用于比较收入不平等的统计工具。许多地区——包括南美洲、非洲、南亚和大洋洲——样本仍然不足，因此很难更全面地了解古代政治经济。在本文中，我们首先介绍了夏威夷群岛的这项措施。这些数据表明，在与欧洲人接触之前的时期，不平等程度极高，与古代专制国家最相似。我们还发现地理格局最终可能与旱地（非灌溉）农业有关。在依赖旱地农业的岛屿（毛伊岛、夏威夷），我们发现不平等程度明显低于其他地方，或者房屋面积更大。我们假设这些可能是如何让财富变得可见，以在需要更多劳动力来增加剩余的地方创造和维持合作的创新。需要更多的研究来检验这一假设，调查其他解释，并将这些发现置于波利尼西亚更大的区域背景中。