About

Scott Ortman is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an archaeologist whose research focuses on demography and settlement patterns in the US Southwest. Ortman approaches human development from an anthropological perspective, integrating complex systems theory to better understand the dynamics of human societies. His work contributes to the broader understanding of how human settlements evolve and interact over time, particularly in the context of the American Southwest.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Geography
• Economic geography
• Civil engineering
• Economics
• Regional science
• Engineering
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Demography
• Archaeology
• Political Science
• Environmental planning
• Epistemology
• Ecology
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• Corrigendum to “Kuznets at -7000: Is there a really long-term relationship between growth and inequality?” [Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 77 (2026) 207-217]

  Structural Change and Economic Dynamics · 2026-05-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Migration and Environmental Learning in Interstitial Areas: An Example from the Northern Rio Puerco Valley, New Mexico

  Open Archaeology · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract In this paper we illustrate the potential of interstitial areas, as distinct from both cores and peripheries, for understanding migration and environmental learning among maize farming populations. We analyze settlement data derived from pedestrian survey of a portion of the Rio Puerco (of the East) watershed in north-central New Mexico. Our exploratory analyses are suggestive of interesting patterns that speak to larger debates in the region, including the extent of the Gallina culture and migration pathways from the San Juan to Rio Grande drainage. Ceramic seriation with updated ceramic data indicates that residents of the survey area had shifting affiliations, with waves of migration from the Chaco, Mesa Verde, and Cibola regions, starting in Early Pueblo II and continuing through Late Pueblo III. Our analyses further refine the chronology and population dynamics of the region. We also provide evidence of settlement scaling, dynamic farming adaptations, and a history of burning at archaeological sites.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Making comparative archaeological and historical urbanism rigorous and open access through the URBank data platform

  Antiquity · 2026-02-06

  articleOpen access

  Adapting to a global urban future requires diverse, long-term perspectives on urbanism. URBank supports this by bringing together global deep-time urban datasets in a modern open-science computing platform. Its design eschews checklist definitions of cities, representing the variability of past urbanism and enabling systematic comparative spatiotemporal research.

  PublisherDOI

• Introducing the Special Feature on housing differences and inequality over the very long term

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-04-14 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Landscapes, Religion, and Social Change in Pueblo History

  American Antiquity · 2025-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract In this article, we explore transformations and continuities in cosmology and cultural landscape structure across Pueblo history in the US Southwest. Many researchers have directly compared the archaeology of the society centered at Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 850–1140) in northwestern New Mexico with ethnographic documentation of Pueblo communities from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This approach makes it difficult to understand how cultural transformation played out in the intervening centuries. Here, we investigate this history by comparing Kin Nizhoni, a Chaco-era Great House community in the Red Mesa Valley, with Wiyo’owingeh, a post-Chacoan community in the Rio Grande Valley. We find that the built environments of both sites expressed similar cosmological principles, but architectural expressions of these concepts became less explicitly marked over time. We also find that this similar cosmology was mapped onto different social structures, with a focus on elite architecture in the Chaco era as opposed to communal dwellings with spatially separated shrines in later Pueblo contexts. We close by proposing a connection between the functions of Chacoan Great Houses and later Pueblo World Quarter Shrines. Overall, our findings underscore the utility of cultural landscape studies for tracing relationships between religion and society across North American Indigenous histories.

  PublisherDOI

• Labor, land, and the global dynamics of economic inequality

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-04-14 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  Here, we assess the extent to which land use relating to food acquisition (farming, herding, foraging) and associated value regimes shaped past economic inequality. We consider the hypothesis that land-use systems in which production was limited by heritable material wealth (such as land) sustained higher levels of inequality than those limited by (free) human labor. We address this hypothesis using the Global Dynamics of InequalIty (GINI) project database, estimating economic inequalities based on disparities in residential unit area and storage capacity within sites in different world regions and through time. We find that inequality was significantly greater in land-limited than labor-limited regimes, whether based on residence area or storage capacity, though governance could moderate these differences. Increasing inequality with larger residence and/or site size is associated with underlying shifts from labor- to land-limited economies. Transitions from labor- to land-limited regimes also appear to underlie the development of extended political hierarchies. Increases in inequality after cultivation became common in each hemisphere similarly reflect shifts from labor- to land-limited systems. Land-limited systems in the eastern hemisphere, incorporating animal traction, exhibit an upward trend in inequality over time, while a downward trend in the western hemisphere reflects the lower persistence of land-limited regimes based solely on human labor.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Kuznets at -7000: is there a really long-term relationship between growth and inequality?

  Working Paper Series · 2025-04-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  We use archaeological data on house sizes to generate estimates for economic inequality and economic growth from near the beginning of the Holocene to about the first millennium AD. At worldwide scales these variables are positively related, but patterns are more divergent at regional levels. Cross-sectional regression shows that the formation of central-place hierarchies and development of landesque capital are important in generating both wealth and wealth inequality; development of farming is also important to the generation of wealth. Iron smelting detracts from wealth inequality whereas copper smelting detracts from the generation of wealth. Examination of three well-known interaction zones (Bronze Age West Asia, the Classic Maya world, and first-millennium-AD Britain) shows surprisingly regular transformations of the relationship between economic growth and inequality on millennial time scales.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toward multiscalar measures of inequality in archaeology

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-04-14 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure commonly used to characterize distributions of socioeconomic quantities. Archaeologists and social scientists have recently adopted this method to analyze ancient inequality by targeting specific proxy variables (e.g., residential unit size, burial data, etc.). Variations in the Gini are then examined in relation to key factors such as time, geography, and subsistence. Yet, Gini coefficients could be obtained across different scales of aggregation, from small neighborhoods within a larger settlement to an ensemble of multiple settlements that are part of the same polity. These different scales of aggregation represent considerable methodological and theoretical challenges, as larger scales might, for example, imply greater social and economic variation within groups and thus affect the Gini coefficients. Furthermore, these issues can also be exacerbated by the idiosyncrasies and limitations of historical and archaeological datasets. This paper discusses the potential and challenges of measuring Gini coefficients at and above the scale of individual archaeological sites, contrasting different approaches and discussing how each can reveal insights into different patterns of past wealth inequality, addressing methodological, empirical, and theoretical implications arising from the multiscalar nature of human interactions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assessing neighborhoods, wealth differentials, and perceived inequality in preindustrial societies

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-04-14 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access

  Humans often live in neighborhoods, nested socio-spatial clusters within settlements of varying size and population density. In today's cities, neighborhoods are often characterized as relatively homogenous and may exhibit segregation along various socioeconomic dimensions. However, even within neighborhoods of similar social or economic status, there is often residential disparity, which in turn impacts perceived inequality. Drawing on the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project database, we study housing inequality within a sample of neighborhoods using the Gini coefficient of residential unit area and related measures of inequality. We examine patterns of intracommunity inequality within more than 80 settlements from diverse spatiotemporal contexts including some of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, the Classic Maya region, the Central Andes, and the Indus River Basin. Residential disparity differs within and among sectors of these settlements; some neighborhoods exhibit more similarity in residence size, resulting in lower degrees of housing inequality, while other sectors display greater variations in residence size with higher degrees of housing inequality. We observe a meaningful relationship between neighborhood inequality and population size, but not date of foundation or longevity of occupation. The macro-level structural processes associated with varying forms of governance seem to trickle down to the scale of the neighborhood. These findings may help explain why more unequal systems are not necessarily more unstable, as the inequality people experienced in their neighborhoods may generally have been less than that present in the overall settlement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assessing grand narratives of economic inequality across time

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-04-14 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access

  Long-entrenched grand narratives have tied inequality in large human aggregations to generally linear trends, a direct outcome of domestication, then fostered by population growth and/or stepped scalar transitions in the hierarchical complexity of human institutions. This general pattern has been argued to short-circuit or reverse only in the context of cataclysmic disasters or societal breakdowns. Yet, for the most part, these universal deterministic frameworks have been constructed from historical or ethnographic snapshots in time and afford little systematic attention to human institutions or agency. Here, we leverage quantitative, temporally defined archaeological, and ethnographic data from a suite of global regions, most of which transitioned through the process of urbanism and complex hierarchy formation, to examine shifts in degrees of inequality over time. Although broad temporal patterns are evidenced, the regional trends in inequality are neither linear, uniform, nor triggered immediately or mechanically by Malthusian dynamics or scalar increases.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Incorporation and Culture Change as the Result of Culture Contact

  NSF · $299k · 2017–2020

• The Creation and Division of Wealth and the Long-term Consequences of Inequality

  NSF · $199k · 2021–2024

• Collaborative Research: HNDS-R: Human Networks, Sustainable Development, and Lived Experience in a Nonindustrial Society

  NSF · $218k · 2023–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Timothy A. Kohler

  Washington State University

  44 shared

• José Lobo

  34 shared

• Luís M. A. Bettencourt

  University of Chicago

  28 shared

• Michael E. Smith

  15 shared

• Mark D. Varien

  13 shared

• Donna M. Glowacki

  University of Notre Dame

  13 shared

• John Hanson

  11 shared

• Kaitlyn E. Davis

  Heritage Preservation

  10 shared

Labs

• The Social Reactors ProjectPI

  Human settlements and networks in history

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy, Anthropology

  Arizona State University

  2010

• Master of Arts, Anthropology

  Arizona State University

  1998

• Bachelor of Arts, Anthropology

  Stanford University

  1994