Dr. Jacob Holland-Lulewicz

And this is not unlike how archaeologists have approached the past in many ways, right?

We find...

a big pyramid or a huge palace maybe, and we're like, wow, they have a lot of power, right?

But once we start maybe looking broader and kind of contextualizing this, right, we find like, hey, right down the road from this White House, there's actually a much larger building and it has way more seats.

And, you know, this is the same where I work in the Southeast where, okay, we have –

Maybe earthen mounds where there may be important people living on top of them.

But, you know, right next to the mound, there's a big round structure.

And so we find, you know, with the White House, obviously we know about our system of governance.

We know it's based on checks and balances and these different arms of the government.

And we actually find those same kinds of checks and balances in the archaeological record, too.

Oh, yeah, I think so, yeah.

And I think...

maybe for a lot of people in other disciplines and even the public, I think what we found is really exciting and really fun and I think really hopeful, too.

Hit us with some hope.

Yeah, we found that democracy has really deep roots, right?

It's not a modern invention.

You know, the Greeks may have...

come up with particular kinds of institutions and particular forms of collective governance.

But all over the world, societies everywhere have figured this out, right?

We find examples, at least in our paper, for democracies in Asia, democracies in North America, democracies in Mesoamerica and Central America.