ICYMI

Archaeology validating anarchy

This one's for all the homeys who reject justifications for social authority and seek to abolish institutions of coercion and hierarchy: Archaeologists from University College London unearthed a huge network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches at the Chinese walled site of Pingliantai dating to the Longshan period 4,000 years ago.

Notably, this complex network was engineered without the direction of any centralized state authority. "The discovery of this ceramic water pipe network is remarkable because the people of Pingliangtai were able to build and maintain this advanced water management system with stone-age tools and without the organization of a central power structure. This system would have required a significant level of community-wide planning and coordination, and it was all done communally," said Dr. Yijie Zhuang of UCL.

The site itself shows little evidence of a social hierarchy or stratification. The houses are "uniformly small," and a cemetery exhibits no evidence of hierarchy in funerary rites, in contrast to other excavations dated to the same period. According to the article, the Pinglangtai site demonstrates that egalitarian and communal societies were capable of mass engineering accomplishments.