Ancient Mexican city reveals social roots of democracy

One of Mexico’s greatest ancient cities dominated the southern highlands of Oaxaca for a thousand years despite limited resources and poor soil — in a rare glimpse at a long-lasting near-democracy whose sustainability practices trumped those of most cities today.

That city’s ability to thrive — for a staggering 1,300 years — was largely  thanks to a cooperative, communal social structure that provided immigrants with economic opportunity and a good life, a new study in the Frontiers in Political Science journal has found.

“Why were people drawn like a magnet there, when they had to be living at close quarters to neighbors, on not-that-great farmland?” co-author Gary Feinman asked.

They came, he told The Hill, “for the things that encourage families and individuals to move today: security and economic opportunity. And part of that was a consequence of how it was organized politically and economically.”  

If the study is correct, Monte Alban was an outlier among other ancient civilizations of Mexico.

The equitable conditions in Monte Alban would have bucked the trend of the rigid aristocracies that held sway in the Maya city-states to the east and the militaristic republic of the ancient Mexica — commonly known as Aztecs — to the north. They also strayed far from the strict social orders that largely held sway at the time in urban centers across Europe, Africa and Asia.

Since the 1980s, many possibilities have been offered and disproven: that powerful leaders coerced people to move there, or that it was located near good soils, as previous settlements in the Valley of Oaxaca had been.

But analysis by Linda Nicholas — Feinman’s wife and first author on the paper — found that Monte Alban had some of the least reliable rainfall, and therefore some of the riskiest agriculture, in the region.

Rather than good land, Nicholas and Feinman concluded that people had been drawn to Monte Alban by both its natural defenses — it was situated on a high hill dominating the valley — and, perhaps more importantly, by an egalitarian and communal social structure that afforded ordinary people a role in civic life that was rare in cities at the time.

Traces of this civic life persist beneath the city’s ruins, which differ dramatically from other urban sites. Monte Alban’s public buildings were large central plazas open to all, rather than palaces restricted to the elite. There are none of the carved depictions of rulers that Feinman described as “billboards for the regime,” such as those in the Olmec cities of the Gulf of Mexico, the Maya cities of the Yucatan, and the Mexica sites around Mexico City — not to mention the ruins of Greece and Rome.

The houses of common people also showed a need for “inter-household cooperation,” according to Feinman. Some such shared systems included retaining walls and drains that would have required communal maintenance, and “economic interdependence” between different families which specialized in different goods, he said.

“People not only lived very close together, but they also must have been highly cooperative from one domestic unit to another, because if part of the retaining wall collapsed or the drain got clogged, they’d have to work together to fix it,” Feinman said in a statement.

These collective factors helped ordinary residents of Monte Alban to achieve a noticeably higher standard of living than people in the villages that preceded it, Feinman said.

Before the settlement of Monte Alban, he said, regional elites lived in well-insulated, wind-proofed adobe and cooked on high-quality reduced-fire pottery; the poor cooked on porous “brownware” and lived in thatch huts. 

But once Monte Alban was established, what had once been luxury became commonplace: everyone lived in adobe houses with stone floors and cooked on the same high-quality reduced fire pottery, Feinman said.

“All of these things point to both a governance structure that was not concentrated in one leader or family, and also a somewhat equitable economic profile,” Feinman said.

While that doesn’t precisely mean a democracy, it is also a far cry from a despotism, implying a “mutual relationship between people who have power and people that don’t,” Nicholas said in a statement.

In Nicholas’ view, Monte Alban represented a social contract. “The powerful may have coordinated defense, helped organize marketplace exchange, and conducted ritual activities that enhanced community solidarity.”

Most people, meanwhile, “produced food and other goods that sustained the settlement and, through taxes, supported governance. It was a collaborative process that relied on compliance,” as opposed to coercion, she said.

Feinman and Nicholas’ paper is the latest in a long series of articles examining the social and economic foundations of both democracy and autocracy — and of whether either is an innate part of how humans live in cities.

“The traditional view for 75 yeas has been on the side of the ancient world being autocratic, with only Greece and Rome as somewhat democratic societies, and that only in the last 200 years, in Euro-America, do we see more democratic organization,” Feinman said.

That view, he said, “cannot be sustained. Given more and more information that’s been collected — that generalization about the past being autocratic cannot be right.”

But neither, Feinman said, is it a slam dunk for the competing view — made famous in the 2021 bestseller The Dawn of Everything, by anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow — that the dawn of cities was an egalitarian utopia, tragically crushed by later oligarchs.

It’s a mistake, he said, to project a more equitable society onto the mute ruins of ancient cities — and to use that “to foresee a more equitable future. That’s hopeful but I’m not sure empirically how sustainable it is.”

But ancient cities and civilizations do help untangle which social and economic factors promote relative democracy — and which tend to promote despotism and autocracy, Feinman said.

And a critical factor on how equitable a society will be, he argued, is where government revenues come from.

“If it’s funded by an easily monopolizable set of resources — like oil in the modern world — then you’re going to get more autocratic forms of governance, which tend to care less about the wellbeing of the citizenry. Like Russia, or Saudi Arabia.”

The opposite is true for egalitarian societies, Feinman said.

Societies dependent on broad-based taxes on markets, agriculture or craft goods “tend to fund more equitable forms of governance,” according to Feinman.

And he attributed that foundation of democracy to the fact that fates of “the leaders — those people in government — are interdependent with people paying the taxes.”