Cohousing-L Mailing List: New Research on Sustainability -- Collective Governance vs Autocracies in Ancient Mesoamerica

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

An extensive article was published in "Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution" this 
month on the reasons why some cities and communities are active for thousands 
of years and others disappear in a few hundred—or even less. The research was 
done collaboratively by archeologists, anthropologists, and other social 
scientists. 

Cohousers and sociocrats will love the results.

The key elements found to predict the sustainability (longevity) of communities 
were:

1. Early infrastructural investments
2. High degrees of economic interdependence and collaboration between 
residential units
3. Collective forms of governance.

Sound familiar?

The article is extensive and can be downloaded from the link below. Charts and 
maps are included in the article and more data is available in supplementary 
materials as well. For community planners, the article includes detailed 
analyses of the urban plans which were found to be a major factor in 
sustainability.

"Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica"
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1076740/full

Like other watchers of the National Geographic channel and documentaries on 
archeology, I have been feasting on the results of Lidar, a finally 
inexpensive-enough-to-use technology that laser scans massive landscapes and 
then strips away the trees and foliage to reveal the solid human constructions 
underneath. It is also being used to scan oceans because it can strip away the 
water to reveal objects on the ocean floor. 

Lidar has revealed in Mesoamerica and South America that areas thought to have 
had dozens of cities actually had _thousands_. The number of identified 
archeological sites has increased by 600%. 

The keys found to predict sustainability (longevity) were:

1. Early infrastructural investments
2. High degrees of economic interdependence and collaboration between residents
3. Collective forms of governance.

I quoted those — I didn’t rewrite them to fit cohousing characteristics.

The cultural region studied included the southern two-thirds of Mexico and 
neighboring countries in Central America where fully settled communities were 
first established ca. 2000–1500 BCE. Most of these early settlements were 
occupied by fewer than 1,000 people, but the whole region was closer to urban 
than to the wild jungle that we often envision.

(It was discovered some years ago that what was long believed to have been a 
virgin Amazon forest was not. It had regrown on top of preexisting massive 
buildings, fortress walls, paved plazas, and roadways.)

The article is not easy to read having been written in jargon that may well be 
conceptually perfect vocabulary but it relies heavily on such terms as leverage 
the diversity, macroscale inter-community networks, urban persistence, observed 
empirical patterns, environmental perturbations, hypothesized human responses, 
axes of variation, agentic manifestations, and synergistically intertwined 
data. 

A typical sentence: "We endeavor to address the call for an expansion in the 
temporal range of sustainability studies." The typical ratio of content to 
citations is an author-date citation for every 10-15 words. Some citations 
include eight or more names and dates in parenthesis in the middle of a 
sentence that also has two other parenthetical phrases. 

But the study itself is well worth wading through.

— Political Economy, Governance, and Architecture

The factors that the study ranked to measure the degree of collective 
governance and cooperation in each community were the political economy, 
governance, and architecture.

The collective communities more often and to a greater degree used internal 
financing from local populations including labor and goods. They were 
self-organizing. In contrast, autocratic regimes used external resources and 
were more dependent on elite estates, monopolization of the exchange of goods, 
and wealth captured in wars. 

Collective governance tended to be ‘faceless’ and associated with offices or 
roles rather than reified individuals, and power was distributed.

Concentrated, autocratic power tended to be personalized, frequently tied to 
birth, and characterized by conspicuous burial practices and monuments of 
individuals. Governance was centered around the palaces or mortuary monuments 
of rulers and access was restricted to the elite.

The architecture associated with collective governance tended to include 
accessible plazas, open access ways, and the distribution of public goods to 
all citizens. One example had multiple civic and ceremonial architectural 
complexes and more than 20 ballcourts. Sectors of that site were interconnected 
by many internal paths and roadways. But had no clear indicators of 
individualized power such as a central palace or lavish tombs.

As in earlier comparative studies of prehistoric Mesoamerican and other 
premodern settlements globally, population and population density were 
correlated with collective governance and higher degrees of collective action. 
But demographic size and density alone were not necessary or sufficient to 
predict either.

This study provides research data to confirm the interpretations of David 
Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything that many prehistoric 
cities were quite large and long-lasting with no indications of a hierarchical 
governance structure or kings. If a settlement lacked a central palace and 
evidence of kingships archeologists and anthropologists had categorized it as 
“transitional” or ignored it altogether without looking for other governance 
and organizational structures. The study is quite well documented both in the 
presentation of the authors’ data and references to other studies.

It also highlights those features of cohousing and sociocracy that should be 
preserved as they develop new forms and variations.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines, Washington DC
"Behavior is determined by the prevailing form of decision making." Gerard 
Endenburg