> key social concerns associated with the culture such as the periodic burning down of the houses.

What do you mean by key social concerns? Are you suggesting House Burning was a form of intracommunal violence? The linked article doesn't support that.

Mass burning of homes, on a recurring 60 to 80 year cycle, then to rebuild the same structures, seems odd. Not mentioning it in the posted article seems like an substantial omission.

I don't think I agree, given the motivations and actual practices of burning are both unknown. They mention burnt homes, indicating they're aware of the practice, but steer clear of including in their study. IMO that makes the most sense because while House Burning (which may or may not have been done en masse) could be related to egalitarian home size, it's not clear that it is related; and if it is related, it's not clear at all what the relationship would be.

The only value of tying the two things together would be saying "We don't and maybe can't actually know anything about these people," which is useless. Instead they took a focused approach to using a known tool, the Gini coefficient, to make some specific guesses.

Lice is my guess as to why the houses were burned down—that or spiders.

Or bed bugs :P

How often did towns burn in the written history? Closely packed wooden structures are prone to fire — nothing remarkable

You can find your suspicions answered pretty quickly in the linked Wikipedia article.

The page mentions various explanations (just-so stories that are expected for archaeology). No definitive answer.

Yeah, the disenfranchised burned down the rich people’s homes, same dif

And burn down their own homes as well?

That's pretty much a reflection of current social trends, right?

What sets off your alarms about the concept of "social strata"?

The article goes out of its way to characterize such ancient sites through the lens of our current culture. This kind of archeo-sociology is nothing more than a massive guess as to what was actually going on. There are simply too many possible reasons for different house sizes. The most obvious, to me, is household (family) size. There may, or may not, be a relationship between household size and social level, but I do not see how this would ever be understood from these sites.

Jumping to "household income" seems too much for me, given nothing more than house size.

Example (from the article): "In addition, poorer households are prone to lose members to richer households, have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates..."

This is certainly a more modern perspective and not something I'd associate with a pastoral community like this.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I view such articles with a huge amount of skepticism.

Do you have a specific response to this?

> Based on the results of extensive excavations and geophysical surveys, this article calculates Gini coefficients—a statistical measure of inequality in the distribution of household income—of house floor sizes, which have been shown to be a suitable proxy for evaluating household variability in diverse cultural contexts and in global comparative studies (e.g. Kohler et al. Reference Kohler2017; Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Feinman and Prufer2021; Basri & Lawrence Reference Basri and Lawrence2020).

Otherwise it seems like you're pushing your own preferred interpretation onto data you don't understand.

I don't agree that the authors went out of their way to characterize the ruins through a lens of our modern society. If they did, they've hidden that from me.