This month, like every year, the United Nations General Assembly takes place. Heads of State take the floor to send messages to the world. These messages are broadcast on TV, transcribed, and
Through burial practice, it is believed that the living create, affirm, and transform social relationships with those who have passed. Interring the dead in settlements, sometimes even below house floors, makes ancestors
More
As democracies around the world face mounting challenges and pressures, discussions about autocracy often focus on personalities and ideologies or tend to link governance practices to differences among specific cultural traditions. Yet
More
In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40
More
Political debates about democracy often focus on culture, leadership, or polarization. But history points to a more prosaic—and more powerful—driver of political outcomes: how governments raise revenue. Across thousands of years of
More
When we think of premodern governance, we often default to an image of concentrated authority: imposing rulers presiding over intricately layered hierarchies—pharaohs, emperors, and kings whose power seemed inseparable from the territorial
More
The long American century is over. Across the world, affiliations and institutions staked in blood and soil, faith-based (as opposed to empirically based) ways of knowing, and personalized, autocratic power are all
More
Without archaeology, there is no way to truly examine economic inequality, its causes, and its consequences over very long time spans on a global scale. Until recently, most grand narratives that purported
More![Fallen Empire [Juan Carlos Barquet - Art ]](https://slguardian.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/fallen-empire-480x384.jpg)
Our investigation of the disastrous society-wide collapses of four premodern polities, China’s Ming Dynasty, the South Asian Mughal Empire, the High Roman Empire, and Renaissance Venice led to the discovery of an
More
Flush with my newly minted university degree, I sat down for breakfast with my entrepreneurial grandfather who met me with the question, “So you want to study to be an archaeologist, go
More
Western society is largely in the grips of an entrenched mythology that premodern non-Western states and empires were organized despotically, markedly different from how humans govern themselves in the contemporary West. There’s
More
The modes of communication that a society uses can tell us a lot about its political structure. A research study we published in 2022 revealed distinct modes of communication and administrative recordkeeping in autocratic
More
The New Gilded Age, wars along the Russian border, a global pandemic, battles for women’s rights, even the Titanic: history does rhyme with the present. Yet as former New York Times columnist Bob
More
Recent archaeology emerging from ancient Mesoamerica is flipping the script of public understanding about the people and institutions that inhabited this world: the evidence tells us that cooperative and pluralistic government was
More
In a remarkable new study, the broad-brush patterns between how we use and mark public space and our collective well-being were investigated in 2022 by Quynh C. Yue and colleagues who analyzed 164 million
More
New evidence and understandings about the structure of successful early societies across Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere are sweeping away the popular assumption that early societies tended toward autocracy and despotism. Archaeology has a more
More