In North America, Native Americans may have developed democratic societies a thousand years earlier than previously thought. This is indicated by the relics of several large council and meeting houses that the Muskogee living in what is now the US state of Georgia built around 1500 years ago. This Indian people, also known as Creek, could therefore have voted on decisions in a kind of tribal council for hundreds of generations.
According to conventional wisdom, the first democratic forms of society developed in the ancient Mediterranean region. From there, this concept then spread to other regions, according to the common assumption in European-dominated archaeology. In North America, on the other hand, democracy was considered to be a late development: for a long time, people there lived in small, egalitarian groups until, according to scholarly opinion, larger tribal associations formed around the year 1000 and with them a hierarchical social structure.
New look at Muskogee town halls
This change can be seen, among other things, in the fact that the natives began to build large earth platforms on which ceremonial buildings and the dwellings of the chiefs stood – according to the common view. “From the year 1000 onwards, every tribe had its chief and he lived on the earth’s platform – very simply,” Victor Thompson from the University of Georgia describes this idea. “But our research now adds depth to this perspective and sheds light on the fact that these governance structures were much more complex and democratic at the time than traditional models envision.”
For their study, Thompson and his colleagues re-dated finds from a Muskogee settlement in the Oconee Valley near Cold Springs in northeast Georgia. This Native American people, also known as the Creek, has long been known to build so-called council houses, round huts up to 15 meters tall, whose roofs were supported by numerous wooden posts. Remains of wooden benches and other structures typical of meeting rooms were also found. These finds thus corresponded to the descriptions of Indian meeting houses that came from the time of colonization in the 16th century. According to earlier dates, the Muskogee roundhouses were also built in the 13th or 14th century at the earliest.
Council meetings already 1500 years ago
The problem, however, was that the Muskogee town halls were dated from the 1970s, more recent age determinations on site were not possible because the valley and the find sites have since been flooded by a reservoir. However, in order to gain more information about the true age of the town halls on the Oconee River, Thompson and his colleagues have now subjected the finds kept in the university collections to modern radiocarbon dating using accelerator mass spectrometry. “In total, we have obtained 44 new radiocarbon dates on different parts of the site – making this site one of the best dated early settlement sites in the southeastern United States,” the researchers write.
The re-dating revealed something surprising: Muskogee town halls were built as early as the year 500. They are therefore almost a thousand years older than previously assumed. Archaeologists say this suggests that these Native Americans used democratic community boards and decision-making much earlier than previously thought. “The key message is that these democratic institutions existed and had a long history long before the arrival of Europeans,” says Thompson. Accordingly, the Muskogee already had democratic social structures around 1,500 years ago, in which both men and women participated. This tradition of council meetings and collective decision-making persists among the Muskogee to this day. “This could even make them one of the longest-standing and most inclusive democratic institutions in world history,” the archaeologists state.
Source: University of Georgia; Article: Antique, doi: 10.1017/aaq.2022.31