What archaeology reveals about the rise of all-powerful rulers

Why are some societies ruled by autocrats — powerful people who make all the decisions with barely, if any, checks and balances — while in others, the governed actually have a say?

If you ask an archaeologist, historian or political scientist, this is how the story traditionally goes: People used to move around in small groups to hunt and gather, making decisions more or less collectively. Then they invented agriculture, which tied them to particular patches of land, and allowed some of them to store and hoard resources. This inevitably led to inequality in wealth and power.

This inequality grew as populations expanded and some villages became cities that were so populous they needed strong leaders to maintain order among many. And that was the state of the world until the ancient Greeks devised a new approach called "democracy."

Democracy waned during the Middle Ages, then regained momentum centuries later, again in Europe, the story goes. From there, it slowly but steadily spread to other regions, giving autocrats a run for their money.

It's a tidy tale, but a vast oversimplification, says archaeologist Gary Feinman of the Field Museum in Chicago. His own research shows that autocratic governments are not inevitable when populations grow larger — a variety of societies around the globe throughout history have done things differently.

What's more, these less autocratically organized societies were neither limited to, nor more common, in Europe, but were found around the world, from Teotihuacan in Mexico to Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan.

Feinman described his archaeological perspective on long-term political change in a 2023 overview in the Annual Review of Anthropology and, with colleagues, tested those ideas in subsequent research, published in PNAS and Science Advances . He spoke with Knowable Magazine about the factors that foster autocracy or more inclusive forms of governance.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Which archaeological sites have you worked at, and how have they affected your outlook?

I've spent most of my academic research career doing archaeological fieldwork in Mexico and China. I started out in Mesoamerica, in Mexico, and that's my principal area. I've done work at several scales, from regional surveys to intensive site excavations, including many houses.

When people started to work in Mesoamerica with a goal beyond finding artifacts to fill museum cases, they made the assumption, which wasn't terrible at the time, that Mesoamerican civilizations would be characterized by top-down, coercive, despotic governance and political control of the economy — in other words, that the state directed what people produced, monopolized key resources and tightly controlled the distribution of goods.

That's what I learned as a student in the 1970s.

But as I excavated houses, we often found that in almost every house we excavated, people made something for exchange — tools or pottery, for example. And they used things that they didn't make and that may not even have been made at the settlement where those were situated.

So if everybody made goods for exchange, it would have been very hard, if not impossible, for a central authority to control the economy. We also didn't find any storehouses that would have allowed the leaders to accumulate and hoard resources.

The idea that the state controlled the economy to empower a despotic ruler didn't fit the data.

As we began to compile data on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica across space and time, we found that the nature of rulership, the organization of cities, almost anything we looked at, was variable. It wasn't just this one mode with one all-powerful king like the Classic Maya along the Usumacinta River had.

The Classic Maya glorified their rulers, they had very elaborate burials and fancy palaces much bigger than any other house. That fits the top-down model.

But when you look at a place like Teotihuacan near Mexico City or Monte Albán, near Oaxaca City, they don't fit that, neither in the economic or political realm. Instead of opulent tombs and monuments glorifying a single ruler, Teotihuacan features open plazas for public assembly, murals depicting processions of masked officials rather than named kings, and temples with wide tops designed to hold groups rather than a single ruler or priest.

That was unexpected, as a lot of Western social scientists thought that, with the exception of Greece and Rome, all pre-modern societies were autocratic and that's the way it was until the Enlightenment, when people became more rational.

In China, we surveyed in eastern Shandong province, which was the last area to be incorporated into the empire of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who first unified the country and is buried in the famous tomb of the terracotta warriors. Again, traditional theory would expect that in the aftermath of this incorporation, the area would show hardship and less well-being.

But in fact, the historical and archaeological data show that the area boomed after its incorporation into the empire, which remained unified for several centuries under the subsequent Han Dynasty. Population numbers went up dramatically across the region, new settlements were established, better transport infrastructure led to more integration as areas were more connected to each other and exchanges of all kinds became easier. This was not a despotic regime sucking everything out of areas that had been conquered.

So again, this idea that pre-modern systems of governance were always highly autocratic turned out to not fit the data. Over time, the information we collected raised all of these issues. That ultimately led to the 2023 Annual Review paper, which summarizes how these ideas that have been at the core of Western social science for around 500 years became entrenched. That paper is an effort to chart a new way.

I have since been a contributor to two large studies with two different teams testing those ideas.

Can you tell us about those studies?

The first one, published in 2025 in the journal PNAS , explored the relationship between inequality and demographic and political scale by looking at the difference between the largest and smallest houses at over a thousand archaeological sites. The second one, which I led and was reported March 2026 in Science Advances , looked at the relationship between the nature of governance and scale across 40 archaeological and historic contexts .

The assumption has long been that throughout most of history the concentration of power and inequality both increase with population size, because people lacked the wherewithal to get things done without top-down, coercive leadership. These two studies showed that population size matters but is not deterministic. In both studies, it only explained around a quarter of the variability in equality or degree of autocracy.

In addition, in our data we see evidence for democratic practices in other parts of the world than ancient Greece and republican Rome at roughly the same time, or maybe even slightly earlier. These two civilizations may have had the biggest influence on modern society, which is a function of how records were kept and stored and transmitted over time, and we don't mean to diminish the importance of those places. But they're not unique as people have presumed. And it's certainly not true that every place else was organized autocratically.

Finally, we show that everything did not change with farming. This is a very entrenched argument: the idea that with farming and sedentary life, everything changed rapidly, and that then we were on an inevitable course of increasing scale, increasing concentration of power, and so on. Our data don't support that. It's not that agriculture wasn't a key innovation. It was, and it did have long-term impacts. But they weren't always immediate or the same.

I think those are the key points: We are finding evidence that does not conform to very longstanding and entrenched views, not just in archaeology, but across the social sciences.

Could we still say that things like farming and increased population created opportunities for autocrats, even if they didn't make autocracy inevitable?

I think an increase in scale definitely creates opportunities for autocrats, and I think agriculture creates the opportunity for increases in scale because it increases productivity.

But what comes out of our research, which I think is very important, is that the concentration of power mainly comes from how resources are channeled into political institutions.

When a state must collect a lot of its tax by taking a little bit from many farmers or tradespeople, it's probably going to be more democratically organized. We call these "internal resources." Under such conditions, autocracy would be hard to achieve: People can vote with their feet by moving away, so you have to make them want to contribute.

But when resources and technologies can be monopolized, whether they be control of trade routes or war booty or mines or plantations and slavery, that's when you find autocracy. We refer to these as "external resources."

With monopolized external resources, you don't have to depend on getting a little bit from many people. By having a relatively channeled or controlled resource, you just pay a small number of people to help you protect that resource. You don't have to exploit your citizens, you can more or less ignore your citizens.

To clarify, slave estates and even feudal estates, in our terminology, are external resources. The people who work there have little or no freedom. Autocrats want to escape having to pay for labor. If through time, they can capture that labor, they can turn small-scale farming, which is an internal resource for which they depend on their citizens, into an external resource they control themselves. That's an autocratic strategy, to exploit people who lack citizenship status.

As for the free citizens, I think a misconception in a lot of prior literature was that autocrats tend to terrorize and exploit citizens. From my perspective, it's more typical for autocratic parties to ignore their citizens, because they don't need taxes from them. They don't really want to see them harmed, because they may be useful at some point, and they may still contribute some resources. But they can sort of ignore them.

You've explained that you quantified inequality by looking at the difference between the largest and smallest houses. But how do you quantify even more abstract concepts like autocracy or inclusiveness?

This is where working with a team was important. For the research published in Science Advances , our first get-together was mostly about designing a protocol that a dozen people who were experts on various places and periods felt could work to compare the degree of autocracy across all these different cases. We decided on two key dimensions. First: How much power is concentrated in a very small number of individuals? Second: How much opportunity do everyday people have to communicate with each other and express their views and opinions? Our challenge was to measure those two dimensions, concentration of power and inclusiveness, using the kinds of information we have from archaeological and historical sources.

We devised a suite of 27 "proxies," things we could measure or reconstruct that provided information on key features of governance. Are decisions made in an impregnable fortress or a wide-open council house? Does the state's art glorify a single ruler, or does it focus on gods, nature and the community? Are there large, accessible public plazas where citizens can gather, or is the architecture highly restrictive? And then we collected as many of those proxies as we could find across 31 localities from around the world, several of which had multiple discrete time blocks for a total of 40 cases. These were then integrated and summed to give every entity a placement on an autocracy index we developed.

This gave us a basis to examine the causes and consequences of the observed variability in autocracy. We have so many proxies that even if somebody quibbles over one, that's not going to affect the overall results all that much.

What does a more equal society look like in the archaeological record? Can you give me an example?

Many societies were initially interpreted to have been autocracies, because of things like the monumentality of the buildings. It was assumed that places like Teotihuacan must have been autocratically organized because they built these giant pyramids. Why would people ever build those pyramids unless they were forced to by an autocrat?

But it turned out that Teotihuacan was pretty collectively organized, lacking evidence for a singular ruler. In addition, the pyramids had wide enough tops for at least 10 or 12 people to meet, whereas the Classic Maya temples in places like Tikal have space for only one or two, maybe three people at the top, suggesting they were led by a single leader.

Some people still thought there must be a king's burial at Teotihuacan. So over the last decade or so, archaeologists have made tunnels under the three biggest pyramids in Teotihuacan, looking for the ruler's burial.

And what have they found? Offerings, sometimes sacrificial victims, but no king. This is very different from the key Maya temples and pyramids, which often were temples that served as the funerary mausoleum for a Maya king. There's none of that at Teotihuacan.

Then if you look at the layout of the city, Teotihuacan is laid out with wide thoroughfares and big plazas. People could get together. It's more inclusive. That's not the case in Classic Maya cities.

In the art of Teotihuacan, murals have been preserved and generally show the most important people. They're usually in a group, there's not one single king. They're not named. And they're often part of processions. And in various scenes, the supernatural beings or the important figures are giving out water or seeds or other goods to the people.

The Classic Maya, on the other hand, often depicted their kings stepping on a captive or collecting goods from others, taking rather than giving. This indicates that murals can portray a ruler in their likely role.

What might explain the differences between these two civilizations?

In the case of the Classic Maya, the trade routes along the Usumacinta River were hugely important. They traded cacao. They traded jade. They traded obsidian. They traded cloth and feathers. These goods were both consumed and exchanged. The control of that trade, an external resource that could be controlled by the ruling elites, was very important to the Classic Maya lords and their transactional relations with other lords.

Whereas in Teotihuacan, I think the principal financing came from labor taxes, perhaps some sort of tax on farmers and small-scale craft production. So the government was much more internally financed, from what we can tell — we don't have written records. We don't have any evidence that the control of long-distance trade in the Teotihuacan case was directed by the government. Crafts were produced in residential places all over the site, not just in the pyramids.

I'm sure many people would classify taxes as quite autocratic.

I think the idea that paying tax is essentially exploitative is another misconception. By paying tax , you might get some services that help you live better. Paying tax may allow a democratic government the opportunity to create goods and services, which may allow the citizens to produce more, or trade more, or raise more kids because they can have a better life.

In the pre-modern world, there was a lot of mobility. People could move around. So if you're depending on a tax base of farmers or small-scale craft people, you want to bring those people close to you so you can tax the wealth they produce.

A lot of what we see in the historical record is not necessarily direct redistribution of wealth. Governments gave back by creating wide streets, big open spaces where people can get together and systems to bring water to people, as well as of course by organizing defense. All of these are ways that governments can work with people to improve the lives of everyday citizens.

We've also found that in more democratic societies, ritual tends to be participatory — things like collective dancing, processions, feasting — all aimed at engendering trust, cohesion and cooperation. In a lot of cases, prosperity and growth emerge from a win-win situation: If you have a functioning government that collects taxes, but uses them to improve people's lives, society may be bit more hierarchical, but well-being will benefit.

That being said, you always have tension, and things change over time. There are always people trying to get more for themselves, or to avoid having to share. That can undermine the system. Whether you read about republican Rome, the Weimar Republic or the United States today, democratic systems can be undermined, generally through the concentration of wealth, which often fosters a concentration of power.

In Monte Albán in Mexico, the region where I've worked, after more than a thousand years of being one of the longest-lasting collectively organized cities that we know, we start seeing statues glorifying rulers and evidence that these rulers inherited their position, which is not evident early on. So even there, there was some sort of breakdown, and then the whole city collapsed. It's pretty hard to maintain democracies. They are particularly fragile, because in many ways they're more complex.

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Is this why they often develop very complex administrations too — something taxpayers love to complain about?

Yes. We can see this complexity in Monte Albán and Teotihuacan, which had lots of public buildings that could have had a bureaucratic function — they're not residences. Such a multitude of public buildings other than palaces is an indicator of more bureaucratic activity.

Of course, you can pervert bureaucracies into more nepotistic, transactional systems. But I think you need bureaucracy in a democracy because, again, you have to collect taxes, and also you need certain kinds of labor to build infrastructure, provide security and organize society.

Bureaucracy can also be a check on centralized power. I think a mistake that came out of early social science was that people looked at ancient Asian societies and assumed that because they had big bureaucracies, they must have been dynasties, very centralized and very unequal.

In reality, the elaborate bureaucratic system in ancient China frequently checked the rulers to some degree. Bureaucrats had to take a test to get in, so it was quite meritocratic. And they had certain loyalties to their hometowns, so they didn't always agree among themselves. So collectively, they had somewhat different interests than the ruler did, and defended them.

If you look at the most democratic times of the United States, say the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, our bureaucracy back then was very effective, which led to increasing standards of living for the general population. A lot of our ideas are based on these mythic notions that government doesn't work for the people. But I think it depends on the kind of government.

Are there other impressive or inspiring examples of collective or democratic governance in corners of the world and eras where most people do not expect them?

There are a number of examples from North America — the Iroquois, the Zuni, Chaco Canyon. They were relatively small, but they were certainly large enough that higher degrees of inequality could have been sustained. Yet they were collectively governed and had lower degrees of inequality, with different communities sharing power. Some people argue that some of these Native American practices of governance may have influenced the early founders of the United States too.

I hope our work helps people realize that the past does have a lot of lessons. As the saying goes, the past doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. The old frameworks — claiming the world was always autocratic and becomes ever more so as societies grow — make the past seem remote and the present and future immune to change. But if more inclusive kinds of governance have been there all along, then all of a sudden, those lessons from history become much more relevant.

Hopefully, people in policy will be able to incorporate some of this new thinking into how they address today's problems.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine , an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter .