QuantWealth.eu – an online app for easy quantitative wealth and inequality studies

This paper presents a new easy-to-use online browser app QuantWealth.eu for calculating prehistoric wealth display and inequality using count data (e.g. objects, construction features, etc.) from graves, hoards, or houses and physical measurement data from house/storage area, burial mound volume/area, or grave pit depth. For grave good/feature counts, the app builds on Nørtoft (2022) to estimate exclusivity (here called “prestige”) values of grave goods/features, or other count (hoard/house artefacts) as input in the app’s inequality measurements such as the Gini and Absolute Gini. For physical measures, inequality calculations are based directly on e.g. measured house floor areas. The results are presented in interactive plots, which can be downloaded. The app also features an interactive time atlas and simple and flexible tools to dynamically visualize trends and developments of wealth display and inequality for any drawn area of the atlas, based on results and data submitted by myself and (optionally) by users. Thus, as more people use the app and add their results, archaeologists collectively build an empirical overview of wealth display and inequality through time from multiple complementary modes of wealth expression with potentially global coverage, which can be dynamically combined and visualised in the QuantWealth’s wealth and inequality trendplot.