Childe’s sequence of Neolithic Revolution succeeded by Urban Revolution presented a progressive narrative of farming development and increasing social inequality (Childe 1929, 1950, 1957) that was influential across the social sciences (e.g. Boserup 1965, Lenski 1966) (see also Chapter 1). Childe’s work was valuable in pointing to the relationship of farming and emergent inequality: farmed land is a key form of unequally held material wealth that is transmitted across generations in many farming societies (e.g. Borgerhoff Mulder et al. 2009; Shenk et al. 2010), and its ownership and use is therefore of fundamental importance for assessing the relation of farming to inequality.
