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

[John Buck (john.buck]

Thanks, Sharon. Definitely an interesting article.

On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 6:54 PM Sharon Villines via groups.io <sharon=
sharonvillines.com [at] groups.io> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
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