The article goes out of its way to characterize such ancient sites through the lens of our current culture. This kind of archeo-sociology is nothing more than a massive guess as to what was actually going on. There are simply too many possible reasons for different house sizes. The most obvious, to me, is household (family) size. There may, or may not, be a relationship between household size and social level, but I do not see how this would ever be understood from these sites.

Jumping to "household income" seems too much for me, given nothing more than house size.

Example (from the article): "In addition, poorer households are prone to lose members to richer households, have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates..."

This is certainly a more modern perspective and not something I'd associate with a pastoral community like this.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I view such articles with a huge amount of skepticism.