《Ancient Settlements》成人英語閱讀
Ancient Settlements
The square footage of a home tends to be a measure of wealth. Compare the sizes of dwellings in a city and you"ll get begin to get a picture of rich and poor, and how wealth is distributed.
房子的大小往往可以衡量財富。比較一下，城市房子的大小，你就可以想像的到窮人和富人的場面，以及財富是如何分配的。
Now researchers have used that modern metric on ancient settlements. They investigated housing-based wealth at 63 archaeological sites, from Old World places like Mesopotamia to New World sites like Mesa Verde in Colorado.
現在，研究人員用現代的度量標準測量了古代的場所。他們調查了63個考古遺址的房產，從古代世界的美索不達米亞平原到新世界遺址如科羅拉多的梅薩維德。
As expected, the wealth differential widened as agriculture took off. And it kept growing in the Old World. But in the Americas the gap suddenly stopped growing about 2500 years after the first crops showed up.
正如預期的那樣，隨著農業的發展，貧富差距擴大。並且在舊世界也在不斷增長。但是在美洲，在第一批作物出現後的2500年後，這種差距突然停止了。
"Well, this was a surprise first of all." Timothy Kohler is an archaeologist at Washington State University. His team"s hypothesis for the differences between hemispheres? The Old World had large domesticated animals—and that was a game changer.
「首先，這是一個驚喜。Timothy Kohler是華盛頓州立大學的考古學家。他的團隊假設了南北半球的差異?舊世界有大型的馴養動物——而這改變了遊戲的規則。
"Because if you have a team of oxen available, then you can farm much further from your house, farm much more land, and raise your income quite dramatically." That sort of farming is land-hungry, he says. So, over time, landowners with beasts of burden got richer at the expense of landless peasants.
「因為如果有一群牛，你就可以在家種植更多的莊稼，耕種更多的土地，進而大幅提高你的收入。」他表示，這種耕作方式是以土地根本，所以，隨著時間的推移，擁有大量牲畜的土地主們剝削無地的農民變得更加富有。
The study is in the journal Nature.
該研究結果發表在《自然》雜誌上。
Kohler says it"s harder to scrutinize the holdings of the wealthy today, in an age of shell companies and offshore accounts. But he has this tip for future archaeologists:
Kohler說，在一個空殼公司和海外賬戶的時代，現在很難對富人進行持股審查。但是他對未來的考古學家有這樣的建議：
"My advice to them would not be to look just at their main residence, but if they have residences in New York City or in the Bahamas or whatever, they need to add up all those residences and attribute them correctly to a single household."
「我給他們的建議不是只看他們的主要住所，而是如果他們在紐約或巴哈馬群島有住宅，那麼需要把所有的住宅都累積起來，換成一個單獨住宅。」
Given the modern-day stats on the wealth gap, they"ll probably uncover a society even more unequal than the ancient Old World.
考慮到當代關於貧富差距的統計數據，他們可能會發現一個比古代世界更不平等的社會。
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