Dr. Jacob Holland-Lulewicz

I work on societies who are the descendants of the Muscogee Creek Nation.

And square grounds are, you know, center to social and political life.

They're where people gather together.

to reaffirm relationships and strengthen bonds between people and eat great food.

And looking at things like the size of plazas, again, can tell us who's meant to be in that space.

How many people are meant to get together?

You know, is the whole village around the plaza or is the plaza associated maybe with a palace, right?

Which could maybe tell us something different about what the purpose of this open space is, right?

Yeah, I think they certainly are a great feature for us to identify and begin, as archaeologists, begin to interpret these societies as more collectively or democratically oriented.

You know, on their own, they don't tell us everything, but I think they're really great hints.

Yeah.

Well, I think it looks like, number one, it looks like the absence of those kind of big spaces that can fit a huge percentage of the population.

And it is the prominence and centrality of palaces.

It may be things like the

wildly unproportional size of a ruler's house compared to everyone else in the society's house.

Those are the kinds of things we might look for to start making an argument that maybe this isn't the most collective or bottom-up decision-making system that we have going on here.

This is interesting.

I was actually thinking about this this morning.

Because, you know, I think if we just found the White House, we might say... Well, actually, we might say a few things.

We might say, oh, the guy who lives there, he has a lot of power, right?