A new study on ancient societies from around the world is rewriting what we thought we knew about democracy. A team of researchers analyzed archaeological and historical evidence from 31 ancient societies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas and found that shared, inclusive governance was far more common than was once believed.
"People often assume that democratic practices started in Greece and Rome," said Gary Feinman, the study's lead author and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican and Central American Anthropology at the Field Museum's Negaunee Integrative Research Center. "But our research shows that many societies around the world developed ways to limit the power of rulers and give ordinary people a voice."
In an autocracy, just one person or a small group holds all the power; examples of autocracy can include absolute monarchies and dictatorships. In a democracy, decision-making power is shared among the people. Elections often go hand-in-hand with democracy, but not always—many autocrats have been freely elected.
"Elections aren't exactly the greatest metric for what counts as a democracy, so with this study, we tried to draw on historical examples of human political organization," says Feinman. "We defined two key dimensions of governance. One of them is the degree to which power is concentrated in just one individual or just one institution. The other is the degree of inclusiveness—how much the bulk of the citizens have access to power and can participate in some aspects of governance."
Feinman and his colleagues examined 40 cases from 31 different political units across Europe, North America, and Asia, spanning thousands of years. These societies all had different methods of record-keeping, and not all of them left behind written records. So, the team had to find different ways to infer what the governments in these historical contexts were like.
"I think the use of space is very telling," says Feinman. "When you find urban areas with broad, open spaces, or when you see public buildings that have wide spaces where people can get together and exchange information, those societies tend to be more democratic."
On the other hand, some architectural and city-planning remnants indicate a society where fewer people concentrated power. "If you see pyramids with a tiny space at the top, or urban plans where all the roads run toward the ruler's residence, or societies where there's very little space where people could get together for exchanging information, those are all proxies for more autocratic cases," says Feinman.
The team examined the 40 cases that had been documented by generations of archaeologists and historians, and systematically analyzed different aspects of the places' architecture, art, and urban planning. For instance, artwork depicting rulers as larger than life and monumental gravesites associated with rulers both point towards greater autocracy, whereas open plazas and rare portrayals of rulers are indicators of less concentrated power.
The study uses buildings, inscriptions, city layouts, administrative systems, and signs of wealth inequality to measure how societies balanced political power and what factors contributed to the axes of variation in governance that they recorded. The team created an "autocracy index" to place each society along a spectrum—from highly autocratic to strongly collective.
"Among archaeologists, there's entrenched thought that Athens and Republican Rome were the only two democracies in the ancient world, and that in Asia and the Americas, governance was tyrannical or autocratic," Feinman says. "In our analysis, we saw societies in other parts of the world that were equally democratic to Athens and Rome."
"These findings show that both democracy and autocracy were widespread in the ancient world," observes New York University Professor David Stasavage.
Coauthor Linda Nicholas, Adjunct Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum, notes that "societies also developed ways for people to share power and facilitate inclusiveness, revealing that democracy has deep and widespread historical roots. I think a lot of people would find that surprising."
The researchers found that population size and the number of political levels did not account for whether a society would be autocratic, which challenges the established idea that demographic and political scale naturally leads to strong rulers. Instead, notes Feinman, "the strongest factor shaping how much power rulers held was how they financed their authority." Societies that depended heavily on revenue that was controlled or monopolized by leaders—such as mines, long-distance trade routes, slave labor, or war plunder—tended to become more autocratic. In contrast, societies funded mainly through broad internal taxes or community labor were more likely to distribute power and maintain systems of shared governance.
The study also shows that societies with more inclusive political systems generally had lower levels of economic inequality. "These findings challenge the idea that autocracy and great inequality are natural or inevitable outcomes of complexity or growth," said Feinman. "History shows that people across the world have created inclusive political systems—even under difficult conditions."
That bigger picture is especially relevant because today, we are experiencing a concentration of wealth and power among a very small number of individuals. A better understanding of the hallmarks of autocracy and democracy can help us identify threats and pump the brakes on burgeoning totalitarian regimes. "When you do archaeology, you're looking for patterns that contain potential lessons for the world today," says Feinman. "Our findings in this study give us a perspective and guidance that we didn't have before, and they're extremely relevant to our lives."
This study was contributed to by Gary M. Feinman, David Stasavage, David M. Carballo, Sarah B. Barber, Adam Green, Jacob Holland-Lulewicz, Dan Lawrence, Jessica Munson, Linda M. Nicholas, Francesca Fulminante, Sarah Klassen, Keith W. Kintigh, and John Douglass.
