A new international study has challenged long-held assumptions about the origins and history of democratic practices.
Researchers, including Professor Dan Lawrence of our Archaeology Department, found that shared and inclusive governance was far more widespread in ancient societies than once believed.
Their work draws on evidence from 40 cases across 31 ancient societies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas over the last 5,000 years.
Together, the findings show that many communities found ways to limit the power of rulers and give a voice to ordinary people.
We are often taught that democracy started in Greece and Rome.
But the new study shows that several ancient societies developed their own systems of collective decision-making.
According to lead author Gary Feinman of the Field Museum in Chicago, USA, these systems did not always look like modern elections.
Instead, they relied on broad participation in decision-making, and clear limits on elite control.
Because many societies left behind few written records, the researchers used clues from the archaeological record.
Large open plazas and public meeting spaces often point to more democratic practices, enabling people to gather together freely and openly.
In contrast, tightly controlled spaces, grand monuments to rulers, or cities designed to channel movement toward a leader’s public residence, suggest more autocratic power.
By combining information from architecture, artwork, inscriptions, and signs of wealth, the researchers developed an ‘autocracy index’.
This placed each society along a spectrum from highly autocratic to strongly collective, or democratic.
Their findings challenge the longheld idea that Athens and Republican Rome were the only true democracies of the ancient world.
In fact, several societies from Asia and the Americas showed similar levels of shared governance.
One of the most important insights was that the size of a society’s population did not determine how power was organised.
Instead, societies became more autocratic when key sources of wealth could be controlled by leaders, such as mining or war plunder.
Those funded by broad taxes on agricultural products or community labour tended to distribute power more evenly.
The study also reveals that societies with more inclusive systems of governance had lower economic inequality.
Taken together, the results of the study challenge the belief that inequality and strong rulers naturally emerge as communities grow, and that hierarchies of power and wealth are simply the price we must pay to live in large, highly organised societies.
These findings matter today as many countries face growing concentrations of wealth and power.
By looking at the past, we can better understand the warning signs of autocracy and learn how communities have long worked together to protect shared governance.
Main image shows the wide-open plaza and avenues in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan, a society in which people had more voice. Credit: Linda Nicholas, Field Museum.
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