Tim Kohler is Regents Professor emeritus of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology at Washington State University - Pullman and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico. Originally trained in the archaeology of the US Southeast, then transplanted four decades ago into the US Southwest, he currently pursues research on how and why societies change, at the largest temporal and spatial scales permitted by available data.

His talk, Capital Before Capitalism: The Long Prehistory of Wealth Inequality, talks about how it is pleasant to think, with Rousseau, that there was a time when people lived in a "state of Nature" as "natural equals." And to a first approximation this is true for our long Pleistocene existence as hunter-gatherers. However, long before the Industrial Revolution, long before capitalism itself, and even before the states beginning to appear in the last five thousand years, some societies began to allow the some households to live in houses that were considerably larger than others, signaling the appearance of wealth inequality. Wealth inequality can take several different forms. I report results from the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project, currently in press, that provide the most comprehensive view to date of when, how, and why persistent wealth inequality appears. If there is any blame to be found, it lies mainly in our own great success.