It’s a sunny summer day in Georgia. Boats pull waterskiers across Lake Oconee, a reservoir east of Atlanta. For those without a need for speed, fishing beckons.
But hidden beneath those waters is something special. It’s the remains of a people who practiced democracy since around 500 A.D. That’s some 1,000 years before Christopher Columbus “discovered” North America. And it’s almost 1,300 years before the United States’ Founding Fathers set up a Constitution and way of governing.
With the building of a nearby dam, the reservoir’s waters flooded the valley in 1979. Those waters now partly cover remnants of a 1,500-year-old plaza. An ancient community had built flat-topped earthen mounds here. At least three large, round buildings had bordered this plaza. Such structures have been linked to communities that governed themselves and made decisions as a group. It was an early form of democracy. And signs of this social structure have shown up at other ancient sites in the U.S. Southeast. Some date back nearly 1,000 years.
The site beneath the Oconee reservoir is now known as Cold Springs. Artifacts were found there before the valley was flooded. Now, studies of those artifacts push back the origin of democratic governing in the Americas by several centuries. This research was led by Victor Thompson. He’s an archaeologist at the University of Georgia in Athens.
His team shared its findings May 18, 2022, in American Antiquity.
Such research offers evidence that democracy wasn’t purely a European invention. Similar group-governing emerged in many parts of the world. And that includes Native American societies in what’s now Canada, the United States and Mexico.
This comes as no surprise to American Indigenous groups. Native peoples in the Americas have been trying to convey this for centuries, says S. Margaret Spivey-Faulkner. She’s an archaeologist at the University of Alberta in Canada. She’s also a citizen of…
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