Between 6000 B.C.E. and 1000 B.C.E., the people living in the Carpathian Basin of central Eastern Europe experienced a whirlwind of social and technological change. The first farmers brought domesticated crops. Smaller communities grew into larger settlements, broke apart, and reformed. New technologies such as plows, draft animals, standard measurements, and metalworking transformed working life. Elsewhere in the ancient world, such changes often heralded increasingly unequal and socially stratified societies.

But not in the Carpathian Basin, which covers all of Hungary and stretches to parts of countries including Austria, Serbia, and Ukraine. There, house sizes and grave goods suggest societies remained remarkably egalitarian for 5000 years, hinting that people developed social and political strategies that helped them resist inequality, researchers report today in Science Advances.

“There has been a huge expansion of interest in the origins of inequality over the last decade,” and archaeologists now have reliable tools to study it, says Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University. Kohler co-authored a 2017 Nature paper that used a standard measure of inequality called Gini coefficients to quantify and compare wealth inequality across the ancient world.

Kohler’s paper found that agricultural societies tended to have higher Gini scores—that is, tended to be less equal than—hunter-gatherer communities, and that the use of draft animals often increased inequality further. But when Paul Duffy, an archaeologist at Kiel University, and colleagues pulled together data from 110 sites in the region and calculated house-size–based Gini coefficients for most of them, they found the average score didn’t budge even as technology changed, hovering around an average of 0.21 for 5000 years. The Gini coefficients of cemeteries, where inequality can be expressed through lavish offerings in the graves of select few elites, also showed little change over this time period.

Across similar time periods in places such as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, inequality rose along with the development of plow agriculture. So, why didn’t that happen in the Carpathian Basin?