Household sorting in an ancient setting

We use archaeological data from ancient settlements of three different historical eras on a Greek island to con-struct novel measures of consumption. Using these, we show that the shares of high-quality consumption goods were relatively more concentrated closer to the center of nucleated settlements as compared to low-quality con-sumption goods. There is no such pattern in a placebo settlement. In this unique setting, these quality gradients may reflect differences in household consumption baskets across these settlements. We argue that some alterna-tive, trade or production based hypotheses for such gradients can be weakly ruled out based on our data and archaeological sources.