Powerboats pulling waterskiers fly across Georgia’s Lake Oconee, a reservoir approximately an hour and a half east of Atlanta, on beautiful summer days. Fishing appeals to folks who do not require speed.
Visitors to the lake have no idea that they are looking at the ruins of a democratic organization that goes back to roughly 500 A.D., more than 1,200 years before the establishment of the United States Congress.
Reservoir waters inundated the Oconee Valley in 1979 following the construction of a nearby dam, partially covering the remains of a 1,500-year-old plaza originally surrounded by flat-topped mud mounds and at least three enormous, circular houses. Such structures, which have been related to communal decision making, have been found in other southern U.S. sites dating back as far as 1,000 years.
Before the valley became an aquatic playground, antiquities were unearthed at the Oconee site known as Cold Springs. Newer-than-expected radiocarbon dates for those monument finds now push the origins of democratic systems in the Americas back several centuries, according to a team led by archaeologist Victor Thompson of the University of Georgia in Athens, who published their findings in American Antiquity on May 18.
Institutions like this show archaeologists’ growing knowledge that early advances in democratic government evolved independently in various places of the world. These findings, in particular, add to proof that Native American institutions dedicated to trying to promote broad involvement in political decisions surfaced in various regions, which include what is now Canada, the United States, and Mexico, long before 18th century Europeans took up the cause of popular democratic rule.
Members of certain Indigenous communities today are not surprised by this result. “Native people have been trying to convey for centuries that many communities have long-standing institutions [of] democratic and/or republican governance,” says S. Margaret Spivey-Faulkner, an archaeologist at the University of Alberta and a member of the Pee Dee Indian Nation of Beaver Creek in South Carolina.
Image credits: PAINTING/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
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