Democracy has deep global roots—not just Greece and Rome

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Field Museum

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Wide open plaza and avenues in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan, a society in which people had more voice. Photo by Linda Nicholas, Field Museum.

view more 

Credit: Photo by Linda Nicholas, Field Museum.

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.

 

###

---

Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aec1426 

15,000 years ago, children shaped clay, long before pottery or farming

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

A butterfly clay bead from the Final Natufian period in Eynan-Mallaha (Upper Jordan Valley), colored red with ochre and marked with the fingerprints of the child (≈10 years old) who modeled it 12,000 years ago. Four other beads discovered in other villages were also modeled by children. The study presents the largest collection of Paleolithic fingerprints known today. 

 

view more 

Credit: Laurent Davin

Long before pottery, before agriculture, when the first villages took shape, people in the Levant were already molding clay with their hands, carefully, deliberately, and sometimes playfully. Some of those hands belonged to children.

Link to pictures:  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17O5vHUq6flnwqxNFzYejs0PqDB6JmBUz?usp=sharing

An international team of archaeologist led by Laurent Davin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Leore Grosman, has uncovered the earliest known clay ornaments in Southwest Asia, revealing a forgotten chapter in the story of how humans began to express identity, belonging, and meaning through material culture. The findings, published this week in Science Advances, push back the symbolic use of clay in the region by thousands of years.

The ornaments, 142 beads and pendants, were made some 15,000 years ago by Natufian hunter-gatherers living in what is now Israel. These communities were the first in the world to settle permanently in one place, millenia before the rise of agriculture. Until now, clay in this period was thought to play little or no ornamental role. In fact, only five clay beads from this era were previously known worldwide.

“This discovery completely changes how we understand the relationship between clay, symbolism, and the emergence of settled life,” said Laurent Davin.

A Hidden Tradition Emerges

The ornaments were found at four Natufian sites: el-Wad, Nahal Oren, Hayonim, and Eynan-Mallaha, spanning more than three millennia of occupation. Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, the beads were carefully shaped from unbaked clay into cylinders, discs, and ellipses. Many were coated in red ochre, using a technique known as engobe, a thin layer of liquid clay smoothed onto the surface.

This is the earliest known use of this coloring technique anywhere in the world.

The sheer number and diversity of the beads reveal something unexpected: this was not an isolated experiment, but a sustained tradition. Clay, it turns out, had already become a medium for visual communication, long before it was used for bowls or jars. 

Inspired by Plants and Daily Life

Nineteen distinct bead types were identified, many echoing the shapes of plants that were central to Natufian life: wild barley, einkorn wheat, lentils, and peas. These were the same plants the Natufians harvested, processed, and consumed intensively, plants that would later form the backbone of agriculture.

Traces of plant fibers preserved on some beads show how they were strung and worn, offering rare insight into organic materials that usually disappear from the archaeological record.

Together, the ornaments suggest that nature, especially the plant world, was not just a source of food, but a source of meaning.

Made by Children and Adults

Perhaps the most striking discovery lies not in the shapes of the beads, but in their surfaces.

Preserved fingerprints, 50 in total, allowed researchers to identify who made them. The prints belong to individuals of different ages: children, adolescents, and adults. It is the first time archaeologists have been able to directly identify the makers of Paleolithic ornaments, and the largest such fingerprint assemblage ever documented from this period.

Some objects appear to have been designed specifically for children, including a tiny clay ring just 10 millimeters wide.

The findings suggest that making ornaments was a shared, everyday activity, one that played a role in learning, imitation, and the transmission of social values from one generation to the next.

A Quiet Symbolic Revolution

For decades, archaeologists believed that symbolic uses of clay in Southwest Asia emerged only with farming and the Neolithic way of life. This study and the recent discovery of a clay figurine in  Nahal Ein Gev II overturns that assumption.

Instead, it shows that a “symbolic revolution” began earlier, during the first stages of sedentarization, when communities were still hunting and gathering but beginning to live in permanent settlements. Clay ornaments became a way to express identity, affiliation, and social relationships, visually and publicly.

“These objects show that profound social and cognitive changes were already underway,” said Prof. Leore Grosman. “The roots of the Neolithic lie deeper than we once thought.”

By documenting one of the world’s oldest traditions of clay adornment, the study reframes the Natufians not just as forerunners of agriculture, but as innovators of symbolic culture, people who used clay to say something about who they were, and who they were becoming.

 

---

Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aea2158  

Medieval chess promoted racial harmony and mutual respect

 

Grant and Award Announcement

University of Cambridge

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

A black chess player about to win against a light-skinned cleric. Chess problem 88 in the Libro de axedrez, dados e tablas (Seville, 1283).

view more 

Credit: Patrimonio Nacional. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial

Medieval manuscripts, paintings and chess sets reveal that the so-called ‘game of kings’ defied social structures and racial attitudes by celebrating the intellectual prowess of winners irrespective of their skin colour.

 

A 13th-century Black chess player is about to defeat his white opponent. He looks relaxed – he has a bottle of red wine within reach and a glass filled to the brim. He sits on a finely decorated bench as an equal to his light-skinned opponent: a cleric. This friendly, intellectual scene appears in a lavish treatise on chess completed in Seville in 1283 CE for King Alfonso X of Castile.

This image is a world away from contemporary depictions of Muslim captives being forcibly baptized, or of darker-skinned people executing white Christian martyrs. But it is far from unique.

Cambridge University historian Dr Krisztina Ilko has found a wealth of international evidence of chess subverting racial stereotypes and structures in the Middle Ages. Today (19th March), Dr Ilko’s study ‘Chess and Race in the Global Middle Ages’, published in Speculum, will receive the Medieval Academy of America’s prestigious ‘Article Prize in Critical Race Studies’.

King Alfonso’s Libro de axedrez (1283), now housed in El Escorial in Spain, features dozens of depictions of non-white players from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, each demonstrating their intellectual prowess. One scene depicts a contest between a Muslim and a Jewish player. Another depicts four players identified as Mongols. One casually leans on a saber but the weapon doesn’t pose a threat – the only combat is on the chess board. This scene contrasts other European depictions of Mongols which often associated them with vice and violence.

“Medieval sources repeatedly state that chess is war without bloodshed, and that it represents a just world,” says Dr Ilko, a medieval historian from Queens’ College, Cambridge.

“Chess became a representation of the known world, the people in it and how society should function through orderly moves. Chess was a powerful vehicle for people hailing from widely different places, even civilizations, to interact with each other. It was an intellectual exchange."

Racial structures and race thinking were very much present in the medieval period, even if they didn't use the same words we use today. Chess, Dr Ilko argues, shows that these structures and ideas could be countered and that intellectual prowess could empower people to challenge them.

Dr Ilko says: “When people with non-white skin colour are depicted in medieval images, scholars have tended to see them in either exalted or subdued positions. So you get the Queen of Sheba at one extreme and executioners and other malignant forces at the other. Chess reveals a different, more complex story.

“Chess was and remains a game of logic, where intellectual prowess matters. Chess operated on a different plane where people could engage with each other as equals, irrespective of their skin colour. What mattered was ‘who's smarter?’, ‘who can win?’, not ‘who's more powerful or socially superior?’”

In the Middle Ages, Ilko points out, Europe was lagging behind Islamic science, and King Alfonso’s court actively acquired and translated Islamic knowledge. At the same time, Islamic chess players were admired for their refined techniques, cleverness and tactics. Out of 103 chess problems depicted in King Alfonso’s treatise, 88 follow the Muslim style of playing. Islamic chess masters included the early 8th-century judge, Sa’id ibn Jubair, who was admired for winning contests while blindfolded.

 

Chess sets represented the world and its people

 

The game’s name in Arabic (shatranj) and Middle Persian (chatrang) derive from a variant form of the Sanskrit word chaturanga or four-limbed. This is because chess pieces are thought to be originally inspired by the four main constituents of the Indian army of late antiquity: infantry, cavalry, chariots, and elephants.

As the game was adopted and adapted across different civilizations, Ilko argues, localised concepts of human difference constantly transformed how ‘chessmen’ appeared. Ilko points to the use of facial features including eye-shape and beards, as well as clothing, but argues that colour played a particularly important role. 

“Chess boards immediately had two contrasting colours and the opposing chess pieces were also differentiated through colour,” Dr Ilko says. “This allowed medieval people to project ideas of skin colour and race onto the game.”

 

Persian respect for Indian chess masters

 

The Shahnama, a monumental epic narrating the history of Persian people from the Creation to the Islamic conquest in the seventh century, contains an image depicting how the game of chess was transmitted from India to Iran.

Scholars interpreting these 14th-century illustrations – including two versions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – have assumed that the Persians depicted the Indian ambassador with dark skin and baggy clothes to underscore his defeat to their vizier, the highest-ranking diplomat in the Persian court.

This interpretation is wrong, Dr Ilko argues. The Indian ambassador’s skin colour and clothing indicate that he’s a foreigner but certainly not a defeated one. He is, in fact, shown as a champion of the powerful Indian raja and a guardian of coveted Indian knowledge introducing chess to the Persians for the first time.

“The dark skin colour of intellectual Indian figures in Persian manuscripts challenged the value systems shared by both Christian and Islamic worlds that privileged whiteness,” Dr Ilko says.

According to the text of the Shahnama, the king of India sent an embassy to the Sassanian ruler Kushraw I Anushirvan (ruled 531–79 CE) challenging him to figure out how the game was played or pay tribute. The shāh ordered his counsellors to solve the puzzle but only his clever vizier Būzurjmihr managed to show the Indian ambassador where the pieces went and how they moved.

 

Chess in a Mallorcan altarpiece

 

Another of Ilko’s discoveries relates to an overlooked depiction of chess in a late 14th-century altarpiece dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Myra. Currently exhibited in the Museu de Mallorca in Palma, the altarpiece comes from the demolished church of San Nicolás in Portopí.

The game is set in a Muslim court and involves a dark-skinned man playing chess with a light-skinned opponent. Ilko argues that the scene is a rare depiction of a miracle narrated in the French play Le Jeu de saint Nicolas written around 1200. In it, a group of “pagans,” most likely Muslims, defeat an invading Christian army and stumble upon a sole survivor praying in front of a statue of Saint Nicholas. The local Muslim king positions a statue of Nicholas to watch over his treasures but after gambling over chess in a tavern, three thieves successfully rob the treasury. Saint Nicholas later appears and prompts the gambler-thieves to return the riches, eventually convincing the king and his court to convert to Christianity.

Ilko says the painting reflects Mallorca’s complex Islamic and Christian heritage, while counteracting widely accepted medieval ideas about skin colour. “By representing the king with visibly darker skin than the gambler-thief, this painting challenged the dominant value scheme that prioritised whiteness,” Ilko argues.

“So much has changed since the Middle Ages but chess is more global than ever,” Dr Ilko says. “People still play chess because it's fun and this helps us to look at the medieval period in a different way. So much that survives and gets taught about this period is religious. It’s especially dominated by a Christian worldview. Chess reveals a more diverse and fun Middle Ages.”

Dr Ilko is currently writing a book entitled The Pawns of History: A New Approach towards the Global Middle Ages.

 

Reference

 

Krisztina Ilko, ‘Chess and Race in the Global Middle Ages’, Speculum, 99:2. DOI: 10.1086/729294

 

The adoption of the bow and arrow in western North America

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PNAS Nexus

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

A petroglyph from Newspaper Rock, a site along Indian Creek in southeastern Utah. The rock includes images from cultures dating from 1,500 years ago to much more recent times. 
 

view more 

Credit: David Hiser/Environmental Protection Agency

A study clarifies the date of an important technological milestone: the adoption of the bow and arrow in western North America. The replacement of older weapons by bows and arrows occurred independently in several prehistoric cultures. Briggs Buchanan and colleagues explore this transition in western North America, where the bow replaced the atlatl and dart as the primary hunting technology. The authors focused on 136 radiocarbon-dated, well-preserved organic weapons, which provide evidence of when and where the weapons were used. The artifacts were primarily found in receding glacial ice patches, dry caves, or rock shelters—situations conducive to preserving their organic components. The authors find that the bow and arrow debuted around 1,400 years ago across all of western North America. North of the 55th parallel, which runs through northern British Columbia and Alberta, the bow and arrow was used alongside the atlatl for more than 1,000 years, whereas south of that line and into what is now Mexico, the atlatl was instantly and completely replaced. According to the authors, the sudden and widespread appearance of the bow suggests a single origin followed by rapid diffusion through cultural transmission networks. As to why northern peoples kept the atlatl in rotation, the older weapon may have had some advantages in colder months or in the hunting of certain prey. Regardless of the specific reasons, the retention of the atlatl fits a well-known pattern, in which hunter-gatherer toolkits are more complex at high latitudes than low latitudes. According to the authors, in harsh and variable conditions with little room for error it pays to have a wide range of tool options. 

---