The Early Materialization of Democratic Institutions among the Ancestral Muskogean of the American Southeast

Abstract

Democratic cooperation is a particularly complex type of arrangement that requires attendant institutions to ensure that the problems inherent in collective action do not subvert the public good. It is perhaps due to this complexity that historians, political scientists, and others generally associate the birth of democracy with the emergence of so-called states and center it geographically in the “West,” where it then diffused to the rest of the world. We argue that the archaeological record of the American Southeast provides a case to examine the emergence of democratic institutions and to highlight the distinctive ways in which such long-lived institutions were—and continue to be—expressed by Native Americans. Our research at the Cold Springs site in northern Georgia, USA, provides important insight into the earliest documented council houses in the American Southeast. We present new radiocarbon dating of these structures along with dates for the associated early platform mounds that place their use as early as cal AD 500. This new dating makes the institution of the Muskogean council, whose active participants have always included both men and women, at least 1,500 years old, and therefore one of the most enduring and inclusive democratic institutions in world history.

Geoarchaeology and Coastal Morphodynamics of Harbor Key (8MA15): Indigenous Persistence at a Partially Inundated Native Shell Mound Complex in Tampa Bay, Florida

“…These data falsify at least 70 years of faulty interpretation based on the uncritical typological association of flat-topped pyramidal platform mounds (or "temple mounds") with the Safety Harbor period (after AD 1000) and Native societies described in early European accounts from the region (Bullen 1955;Luer and Almy 1981). Our chronological revision at Harbor Key parallels a larger trend in southeastern archaeology toward recognizing the early emergence of platform mound ceremonialism (Kassabaum 2021;Thompson et al 2022) and early monumental architecture in general (e.g., Saunders et al 2005;Schwadron 2017). The temporality, monumental scale, arrangement, and elaborate morphology of the shellwork complex place Harbor Key among relatively few early civic-ceremonial centers documented on the Florida peninsula where relatively dense populations aggregated around ritually charged locations bearing evidence of ancestral-Late Archaic to Early Woodland-land use (Lawres and Colvin 2021;Pluckhahn and Thompson 2018;Sassaman et al 2020;Wallis and McFadden 2019;Wallis et al 2022).…”

Tracking Mississippian Migrations from the Central Mississippi Valley to the Ridge and Valley with a Unified Absolute Chronology

“…Platform mounds, once topped with multiple buildings that may have housed leaders, temples, or both, were altered to support large, council house-style buildings; in some towns only the large structure was constructed, with no mound (Hally 2008;Rodning 2015;Rodning and Sullivan 2020;Sullivan 1987Sullivan , 2018a. Instead of powerful elites who could order mass sacrifices, as at Cahokia (Emerson et al 2016;Fowler et al 1999), or preside over large regions as at Etowah (King 2003), town councils met to discuss town affairs and make decisions (Sullivan 2018a;Thompson et al 2022). The immigrants were assimilated into coalescent societies.…”