At a time when reduction of inequalities is a major preoccupation for United Nations member countries (by 2030), the longue durée study of various mechanisms of the emergence and reproduction of inequalities, as well as the strategies developed to reduce them, will offer the community global insight into the subject in an unprecedented way. This will give rise to scientific production, but also to citizen action (lectures, participation in cultural and scientific events) on mechanisms underwriting the reduction of inequalities.
The theoretical framework and methodological tools enabling us to identify inequalities will be presented in a first stage (courses and Summer Schools). This will enable us to assess the respective contributions of different results emerging from archaeology (movable objects, habitat, graves, gestures, etc.), physical anthropology (paleopatholgies, osteological lesions, etc.), iconography and texts.
Through comparative and transversal studies, we shall then look for the forms that these inequalities take on in different chrono-cultural contexts: during the spread of Homo sapiens, then the adoption of an agro-pastoral economy within the so-called “egalitarian” societies, during the emergence of complex chieftainships, the first attempts at urbanization and the adoption of state organization of the royal or imperial type.