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China's ancient water pipe networks show no evidence of a centralized authority

232 points by Stratoscope 3y ago

fallingfrog 3y ago
As far as I can tell, the reason hierarchy and elites are prevalent everywhere is not because they make a system more efficient- it’s because they make a system more expansionist and violent. When you put someone in a position of power, insulate them from the consequences of violence, and give to them all the benefits of violence, you get a more aggressive and expansionist society. So over time the peaceful egalitarian cultures just happily exist and the violent hierarchies attack all their neighbors, and guess which one tends to predominate.
FreshStart 3y ago
We will soon see ancient clay tablets about time traveling party members..
RecycledEle 3y ago
I am not familiar with this field, but I wonder if the lack of apparent standardization or centralization could be the result of many generations building on top of each other's work? If you dug up New York City's water mains today, they would be made of many different materials and in many different styles. Now add another 500 years of politics.
Stratoscope 3y ago
Original paper: Earliest ceramic drainage system and the formation of hydro-sociality in monsoonal East Asia https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4
arthur2e5 3y ago
The full title is "China's ancient water pipe networks show they were a communal effort with no evidence of a centralized state authority". Trimming the title down really buries the lede. Try "China's ancient water pipe networks were a communal effort" if you want to fit the character limit.
- dang 3y ago
  Ok, we've put a different segment of the title up there.
coding123 3y ago
Nothing about similar homes and pipe works doesn't describe a non hierarchical structure. Just more Amish if anything
kaffeeringe 3y ago
Yes, people back then were as smart or dumb as we are. They didn't already invent all the stuff we have. But the had the same capabilities of organization. Ancient Greece was most likely not the first democracy. Possibly not even then first in Greece.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  This is what I just don't understand about the European middle ages, or at least the popular depictions thereof. But also the bewilderment of "how could they do this 4000 years ago???". Imagine you didn't have a day job, you didn't have to or couldn't do things for your immediate survival - food is growing, stores are full, everything is fine. I remember as a child I loved to build canals and the like at the beach, or dam off rivers, or play with clay. Turning play into something useful - like drainage - sounds like it'd come natural to a lot of people. Turning boredom into inventions to make your life easier as well. It's probably one of the main thing that differentiated human from primates, finding solutions to problems.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Most of the "but how could they do this" questions concern moving large rocks hundreds of miles without roads or wheels, or building slender towers supported on intricate networks of arches without engineering calculations or even Newtonian physics. That's a step up from everyday solutions to practical problems. For the projects for the average peasant to fill their spare time the amazed reaction tends to be the opposite: "how could they not see fit to extend their tiny hovels, build separate quarters for the livestock, put floors on their muddy paths or consider tidying up and not literally shitting on their own doorsteps. Though much of that explanation lies with vastly overestimating how much spare time people who had to make virtually everything they used and owed service to more powerful people actually had...
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      > or building slender towers supported on intricate networks of arches without engineering calculations or even Newtonian physics. In fact engineering solutions came long before Newtonian physics. Bill Hammack aka engineerguy has a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU
csomar 3y ago
I'm a bit puzzled. This seems like it's trying to push for a narrative (communal planning) when the issue here is that there is a lack of evidence of a centralized one. I'm not sure how lack of proof of that will imply the other. > Excavations at the town's cemetery likewise found no evidence of a social hierarchy in burials, a marked difference from excavations at other nearby towns of the same era. Maybe these communities had a different social hierarchy structure that didn't leave much of a trace...
- bloqs 3y ago
  Human beings are instinctively hierachical like many mammals, its essential to survival.
  - csomar 3y ago
    I am not saying they are not but hierarchical representations do not have to be physical.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    Stating this as a fact in the comments about a society that (seemingly) didn't have the hierarchy you say is essential flies in the face of the evidence. Maybe this is a case of the black swan disproving the "all swans are white" hypothesis.
  - mannyv 3y ago
    One of the things that's talked about in "the dawn of everything" is the large number of what seem to be extremely egalitarian societies...ones that spanned large areas. And that social groups form and get their values/norms/behaviors from being explicitly against certain values/norms/behaviors. According to them, human beings are not instinctively anything. Hierarchy is just one form of social organization. Due to the way history is made it seems to be dominant, but that may or may not be accurate. It may be that hierarchy is easier to understand when you're dumb as a rock. And as any student of humanity knows, there are plenty of those kinds of people all over the world.
    - 3y ago
natch 3y ago
They had coordination between kings of different regions. They had messengers using authentication bearer tokens, for god's sake. Edit: Seems like evidence of something, though not airtight proof of centralization. Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26576528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26576528 which I will modestly (/s) say if you drill into the link and think about what it's saying, will possibly be the coolest thing you read on HN today imho.
- nemo 3y ago
  Related, the Greek word "symbolon" from which we get the word "symbol" means "fit-together" and originally referred to the ancient Greek practice of using broken battery shards the fit together for the same purpose of identification.
  - natch 3y ago
    Awesome. I suppose you mean pottery shards of course.
keepamovin 3y ago
This checks out. This is definitely a characteristic of Chinese culture urban "planning" (operative term is the quotes). You can see the same "ad hoc"-ratic development "philosophy" at work in Chinese cities today. A very unique aesthetic take on "sprawl". Taipei, definitely has this: not just on a macro level (arbitrary street / burrough layout, overpasses & sidewalks and lack thereof), but on a micro level (placement of stairs, entrances / exits in buildings, consideration (or lack thereof) given to pedestrian flow). In my experience there's pockets of order amid the rampant chaos, like the more recent well-to-do (read: often too expensive for almost everyone) fancy apartment developments in Taipei, Shanghai (or there, also the old French Concession), etc. Yet even there sometimes they only look nice (good finishing & production value) but are still unplanned (lack of human considerations for access, flow and comfort). But overall it's very much like how an organism would grow. Like coral. I'm sure the Chinese have some kind of pithy phrase to describe this kind of style of accreted urban development without any adherence seemingly to centrally mandated planned urban design standards and codes. In my experience, the one exception is Hong Kong, which has commendable amounts of order. The design of the subway stations is particularly notable for rational, sensible and practical consideration given to pedestrian flow. There's very few choke/congestion points because opposing streams of flow are clearly delineated and often routed (albeit sometimes circuitously) away from each other. Very well done, HK! Sometimes what looks to be chaotic, is actually ordered underneath (albeit possessing an organic order): like Jiufen in Taipei, or dense backstreets of Tokyo (both inspirations for the Neo Tokyo in Akira). But mostly, these Chinese-style chaotic urban behemoths are just that: seemingly unplanned chaotic development without order. I'd be interested to compare this to the particular "flavor" of Sprawl you see in both more structured, a la, Paris, and less structured, a la Sydney, non-Chinese cities.
- namelosw 3y ago
  > This is definitely a characteristic of Chinese culture urban "planning" (operative term is the quotes). > You can see the same "ad hoc"-ratic development "philosophy" at work in Chinese cities today. First, it was 4000 years ago when the Chinese culture was completely different. Other than that, it's still not entirely accurate. If anything, the planning is very diverse or bumps between extremes in China. You can check out Beijing or any historically important town with walls on the map. Most of those cities are carefully designed in square shape, and every important building is facing towards the south. Things are intentionally majestic. Form over practically sometimes. Most of the examples you have mentioned are southern cities, which are probably heavily influenced by the Suzhou garden design. The most famous Suzhou garden is the Humble Administrator's Garden [0]. The idea of the garden is to use a lot of obstacles and irregular shapes to segment zones. In terms of practicality, it creates more "rooms" instead of wasting space with empty squares. In terms of aesthetics, it creates discoverability where every turn provides a different scene. But most importantly, it's carefully non-majestical to not offend the emperor - the holy ruler of the absolute monarchy (who can easily execute any a whole clan at will without justification). You can also feel the uneasiness even in the garden's name itself. But indeed, a lot of Chinese cultured towns are chaotic by nature. My personal take is regions like Europe and Japan with feudal backgrounds are sufficiently decentralized with proper hierarchy, making every piece of land plan things for themselves, the lords, the church, and the guilds can design and interact back and forth. However, China is purely top-down and lacks organizations between the imperial court and individual levels (the feudal system was brutally wiped out 2000 years ago and made very few unsuccessfully comebacks). Any non-imperial organizations like mansions guides are highly discouraged as those are seen as potential threats. Chinese society in modern terms is a "flat organizational structure", and its people are just individuals (clans and families are often forced apart, and shuffled between lands). As a result, we can see towns as official projects are built in orthodox ways, which are the rest are littered with ad-hocness. Actually, in the South, there were also quite some fortresses that were well-designed and typically resided in difficult terrains such as Tulou [1] (man, they look like Apple Park). Because they were large clans living in remote provinces, the imperial court had a hard time dealing with them so often the court didn't bother. > In my experience, the one exception is Hong Kong As a guy who spends most of my time living in Beijing, my first impression of Hong Kong is its chaotic (in a good way, I love it). You probably know Hong Kong is the most important reference for those cyberpunk concept artworks. Singapore, IMO, is more well thought out beforehand in terms of urban planning. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Administrator%27s_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Administrator%27s_Garde... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_tulou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_tulou
perihelions 3y ago
- "a new study by University College London researchers" There is only one UCL researcher, singular, credited in the paper's affiliations section [0]. The other ten authors split between four different Chinese institutions. The UCL press release kind of erases this and feels misleading to me. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4#affiliations https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4#affiliati...
- archibaldJ 3y ago
  could be exchange students ?
- pjc50 3y ago
  Eh, it probably has to be a collaboration - doubt it's easy to do fieldwork in China or Chinese history without Chinese support - but that does also feel a bit like reputation washing.
bell-cot 3y ago
> ...a network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches at the Chinese walled site of Pingliangtai dating back 4,000 years to a time known as the Longshan period. Reaction: If the site was "walled" (and not somehow occupied after the builders simply abandoned it), then obviously the engineering skills and social organization for large-scale infrastructure construction did exist. > The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system. Reaction: That "earlier understanding" sounds very comfortable and convenient, if you are an archaeologist with elitist social biases, or dependent on support from members of a social elite, or who is a member of his society's social elite. Wealthy and powerful people rationalizing that poor and oppressed people somehow "needed" them was already an old trope when the first pyramid was built.
- duxup 3y ago
  I don't understand why ANY determination has to be made about "social elite" or ... "non-social elite" matters. The fact that construction and some planning took place seems to just be evidence that some planning and construction took place.
  - dmix 3y ago
    They said the lack of evidence of social stratification in the burial sites and house sizes contrasted with other sites near by. Plus remember this is the headline a news site chose not the scientists. It's very plausible journalists (including university PR teams) care more about social elitism than the archaeologists which is why it's the HN headline. The archaeologist is just using the only evidence they have which is some pipes, a cemetery, and few remaining structures to extrapolate about the community.
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    Causal evidence is basically non-existent in archaeology. You are correct that, deductively, we can conclude little more about society from this other than that construction took place. Archaeology attempts to collect all possible evidence and weigh the potential narratives. This can be especially effective at teasing out trends across many sites and cultures. Are we likely getting details wrong if we were to infer a specific society from these trends? Absolutely. We will likely never know most aspects of these cultures—but if that's your goal, even well-documented history will fail us. We know a lot about the lifestyles of european benedictine monks, for instance, because they were excellent record keepers, but we still can't answer basic questions about their lives. Anyway, with this specific article social stratification is one of those things with little ability to extract a narrative from a single data point, but whose importance emerges when collated with others. And it does sound a bit editorialized for modern narratives, but that's probably not intended by the researchers.
refurb 3y ago
Speaking of “no central authority”, I read an article about a city in China that was an industrial hub. The local government was too slow so the road network was entirely built by companies opening factories there. They just created a road they needed, then other companies added to it, etc. It actually worked out pretty well considering nobody was regulating or designing it as a whole.
bogtog 3y ago
> Nature Water Nature has a journal about all things water. From their website: > Nature Water covers all aspects of research that are connected to this evolving relationship between society and water resources. We publish in the natural sciences (primarily Earth and environmental science), in engineering (including environmental, civil, chemical and materials engineering), and in the social sciences (economics, human geography and sociology, among other disciplines) ...anthropology/history is another topic covered here I guess. Something about this feels odd
laci37 3y ago
If they want to show that the infrastructure did not involve central planning, they should search for hacks. Stuff that is not centrally planned always ends up with hack where engineer A's domain meets engineer B's.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  You don’t need central planning to have everyone making things the same style. Think ancient pottery. There wasn’t any authority there yet for generations in some cases potters styled their pots in the exact same way throughout the range of their culture.
einpoklum 3y ago
Two common arguments against Anarchism are that... 1. You can't have Anarchistic societies without advanced technological infrastructure, large production surpluses, group communication etc. 2. You can't have Anarchistic societies with the advent of technology, only primitive Anarchism. This story seems to help undermine a little of both :-)
- ilyt 3y ago
  Why you think it would be anarchistic society in the first place ?
- m4nu3l 3y ago
  I recently read "The Machinery of Freedom". It makes a strong case for an anarco-capitalist society. I'm not sure about either of these arguments. The most robust arguments, as far as I can tell, are those relative to common goods (where you can't exclude access to goods/services) and externalities. The book tries to answer most of these questions. While I'm not entirely sold (at lest not yet) I recommend the book. It's not a rant about the Government, instead it goes quite in depth by proposing what anarco-institutions might look like and what kind of society those institutions are likely to produce by looking at historical cases (like Medieval Iceland) and parts of the current system.
calmunism 3y ago
this is a pretty blatant attempt by chinese academics to curry favour with someone in the newly purged CCP by trying to claim xi-style communism existed in ancient china. surprised phys.org is publishing this rubbish.
- _lvbh 3y ago
  China is a dictatorship. They are claiming that it wasn’t a dictatorship but a communal effort. This goes against the CCP’s narrative
- bunabhucan 3y ago
  What was the original title? Paper itself has: >In China, the tale of the legendary Great Yu’s heroic taming of floods and the subsequent founding of the Xia Dynasty continues to dominate mainstream scholarly narrative on the formation of China’s first state There must be pressure on academics to hew to a "we are an ancient civilization" narrative.
- komali2 3y ago
  Xi-style communism is just capitalism with strong state police authority though, what do you mean? This is basically explicit in party doctrine at this point.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
I don’t understand why a pipe network should even imply any authority at all. Modern subway construction in most western cities is routinely stalled due to finding some random victorian era pipe that isn't on any current utility map, probably built by whoever built that block of properties initially, and promptly lost to time in less than a hundred years due to there being no central authority for these things until the most modern cases.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
This reminds me of the book War before Civilization, about the archeological evidence for pre-historical war and the many attempts to dismiss it, to declare walls merely symbolical (symbols of what?), weapons as means of exchange (valuable why?). A water pipe network is evidence of a centralized authority in the same way that a wall or a weapon is evidence of conflict.
- advael 3y ago
  I think the case for "weapons mean war" or even "walls mean war" (weaker, walls can be built for privacy or defense against theft, but larger ones make a good case) is a lot stronger than the case for "infrastructure implies central authority". Some complex projects can and do get done in unstratified social contexts, and /tons/ of them get done with leadership/authority that only exists within the context of the project itself (and doesn't necessitate being in charge of other things or having more social status in unrelated contexts), which could have been the case for this site Making the claim that the archaeologists are self-evidently wrong here is definitely begging the question. They may well be wrong, but not from logical inevitablity
- plugin-baby 3y ago
  Aren’t weapons for hunting, and walls for protecting people and maybe livestock from predators?
  - dehugger 3y ago
    No one was hunting elk with a sword or keeping a cattle pasture enclosed by a 40 foot high stone wall.
- Ebree 3y ago
  anybody remembers how alpha function in wolf packs was originally misinterpreted?
WaitWaitWha 3y ago
The article makes the assumption that something like this needs centralized authority instead of a loose confederation of a bunch of tribes, cities and villages.
gwbas1c 3y ago
> Researchers cannot say specifically how the people of Pingliangtai organized and divided the labor among themselves to build and maintain this type of infrastructure. This kind of communal coordination would also have been necessary to build the earthen walls and moat surrounding the village as well. So how can the authors assume there was no government or central planning? There was clearly some kind of planning! Otherwise, the network of pipes would have been inconsistent. Clearly this society had different values and priorities that many of the societies that we live in! I think the lesson should be that we don't need win-lose economics to handle critical infrastructure. Aside: The Inca had a "command economy" that operated in a very similar manner to communism. They had no poor people. Hunger (as far as we know) didn't exist. But the society fell very quickly when the Spanish arrived.
ilyt 3y ago
How is that unexpected or innovative ? you-help-me-I-help-you attitude is staple of small, tight knit communities since forever. Can't exactly build barn single handed easily.
t-3 3y ago
A lot of people in this thread seem to be missing the cultural context: the Chinese king Yu the Great is traditionally credited with building canals (mentioned in the first paragraph of the paper). > In China, the tale of the legendary Great Yu’s heroic taming of floods and the subsequent founding of the Xia Dynasty continues to dominate mainstream scholarly narrative on the formation of China’s first state, albeit with great controversy. The importance of state-organized hydraulic projects and elites’ control of water to the evolution of Bronze Age and early imperial societies is also emphasized in recent archaeological studies of water.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  Evidence that a small town of 500 (I'm guessing 100-200 households) can self organize some urban infrastructure doesn't contradict narrative of Xia state hydrology that operates on completely different scale and coordinated between different tribes. 9/10 of the archeology team were from PRC and fine making pronouncement that a few hundred people can get together and do home owner association tier stuff. The drama over King Yu / Xia historicitiy is whether his mythos / achievements was game of telephone. Whether he exists at all and hence whether Xia should be considered as China's first dynasty where ruler successfully tamed water. Whether that comes later is matter of debate, but I don't think anyone has seriously suggested a large culture (i.e. millions of people over vast territory) can self organize huge, sprawling capita projects without centralized authority.
splitrocket 3y ago
Go read the Dawn of Everything: centralized authority was and is not a requirement for highly organized cooperation on a massive scale. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
mikhailfranco 3y ago
A single example is difficult to evaluate, especially when the only context is a walled village, house plans and burials - no written records. However, if you are intrigued by this, read: The Dawn of Everything Graeber & Wengrow
- yboris 3y ago
  I came to recommend the same book! It's one of my favorite books of my life now - I think more people need to read this. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt... or https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0374157359 https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/...
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I cant recommend this book enough and it should be mandatory reading in colleges Great recommendation
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Mind-bendingly powerful work.
asow92 3y ago
Does anyone else feel like this article is trying to say something without actually saying it?
Ebree 3y ago
There is no need for complex organisation structure, hierarchy or any expert alpha in a group of 500..., mostly relatives. Your family is your basic, natural decision making structure. Then your knowledge and know-how was seemlessly transferred between generations. It's not success of decentralisation but of natural unity of bonds and shared common goals. One for all, all for one. One as all, all as one. For 5000 it would still be workable. What intricate organisation structure, except religious cult rules, did Greek Polis as Athens have?...
gaoshan 3y ago
It's amazing how similar the construction of the pipe segments and the pipe network is to ones I've seen from Roman times. Makes you wonder how many times such a thing has been reinvented over the millennia and how interesting it is that common solutions seem to result despite a (probable?) lack of communication on the situation.
thrashh 3y ago
You know, planning isn't something that is necessarily required or necessarily not required. You plan as much as a situation demands. Presumably in a smaller society with abundant water, you can wing your pipes because it doesn't really matter. A larger society in a desert? Well, that's way different. Inefficiencies add up too much. The real trouble is people who just believe in strong rules when really, you should be looking at your specific situation and using your brain.

232 points by Stratoscope 3y ago

As far as I can tell, the reason hierarchy and elites are prevalent everywhere is not because they make a system more efficient- it’s because they make a system more expansionist and violent. When you put someone in a position of power, insulate them from the consequences of violence, and give to them all the benefits of violence, you get a more aggressive and expansionist society. So over time the peaceful egalitarian cultures just happily exist and the violent hierarchies attack all their neighbors, and guess which one tends to predominate.

FreshStart 3y ago

We will soon see ancient clay tablets about time traveling party members..

RecycledEle 3y ago

I am not familiar with this field, but I wonder if the lack of apparent standardization or centralization could be the result of many generations building on top of each other's work? If you dug up New York City's water mains today, they would be made of many different materials and in many different styles. Now add another 500 years of politics.

Stratoscope 3y ago

Original paper: Earliest ceramic drainage system and the formation of hydro-sociality in monsoonal East Asia https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4

arthur2e5 3y ago

The full title is "China's ancient water pipe networks show they were a communal effort with no evidence of a centralized state authority". Trimming the title down really buries the lede. Try "China's ancient water pipe networks were a communal effort" if you want to fit the character limit.

dang 3y ago
Ok, we've put a different segment of the title up there.

coding123 3y ago

Nothing about similar homes and pipe works doesn't describe a non hierarchical structure. Just more Amish if anything

kaffeeringe 3y ago

Yes, people back then were as smart or dumb as we are. They didn't already invent all the stuff we have. But the had the same capabilities of organization. Ancient Greece was most likely not the first democracy. Possibly not even then first in Greece.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
This is what I just don't understand about the European middle ages, or at least the popular depictions thereof. But also the bewilderment of "how could they do this 4000 years ago???". Imagine you didn't have a day job, you didn't have to or couldn't do things for your immediate survival - food is growing, stores are full, everything is fine. I remember as a child I loved to build canals and the like at the beach, or dam off rivers, or play with clay. Turning play into something useful - like drainage - sounds like it'd come natural to a lot of people. Turning boredom into inventions to make your life easier as well. It's probably one of the main thing that differentiated human from primates, finding solutions to problems.
- notahacker 3y ago
  Most of the "but how could they do this" questions concern moving large rocks hundreds of miles without roads or wheels, or building slender towers supported on intricate networks of arches without engineering calculations or even Newtonian physics. That's a step up from everyday solutions to practical problems. For the projects for the average peasant to fill their spare time the amazed reaction tends to be the opposite: "how could they not see fit to extend their tiny hovels, build separate quarters for the livestock, put floors on their muddy paths or consider tidying up and not literally shitting on their own doorsteps. Though much of that explanation lies with vastly overestimating how much spare time people who had to make virtually everything they used and owed service to more powerful people actually had...
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > or building slender towers supported on intricate networks of arches without engineering calculations or even Newtonian physics. In fact engineering solutions came long before Newtonian physics. Bill Hammack aka engineerguy has a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU

csomar 3y ago

I'm a bit puzzled. This seems like it's trying to push for a narrative (communal planning) when the issue here is that there is a lack of evidence of a centralized one. I'm not sure how lack of proof of that will imply the other. > Excavations at the town's cemetery likewise found no evidence of a social hierarchy in burials, a marked difference from excavations at other nearby towns of the same era. Maybe these communities had a different social hierarchy structure that didn't leave much of a trace...

bloqs 3y ago
Human beings are instinctively hierachical like many mammals, its essential to survival.
- csomar 3y ago
  I am not saying they are not but hierarchical representations do not have to be physical.
- onion2k 3y ago
  Stating this as a fact in the comments about a society that (seemingly) didn't have the hierarchy you say is essential flies in the face of the evidence. Maybe this is a case of the black swan disproving the "all swans are white" hypothesis.
- mannyv 3y ago
  One of the things that's talked about in "the dawn of everything" is the large number of what seem to be extremely egalitarian societies...ones that spanned large areas. And that social groups form and get their values/norms/behaviors from being explicitly against certain values/norms/behaviors. According to them, human beings are not instinctively anything. Hierarchy is just one form of social organization. Due to the way history is made it seems to be dominant, but that may or may not be accurate. It may be that hierarchy is easier to understand when you're dumb as a rock. And as any student of humanity knows, there are plenty of those kinds of people all over the world.
  - 3y ago

natch 3y ago

They had coordination between kings of different regions. They had messengers using authentication bearer tokens, for god's sake. Edit: Seems like evidence of something, though not airtight proof of centralization. Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26576528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26576528 which I will modestly (/s) say if you drill into the link and think about what it's saying, will possibly be the coolest thing you read on HN today imho.

nemo 3y ago
Related, the Greek word "symbolon" from which we get the word "symbol" means "fit-together" and originally referred to the ancient Greek practice of using broken battery shards the fit together for the same purpose of identification.
- natch 3y ago
  Awesome. I suppose you mean pottery shards of course.

keepamovin 3y ago

This checks out. This is definitely a characteristic of Chinese culture urban "planning" (operative term is the quotes). You can see the same "ad hoc"-ratic development "philosophy" at work in Chinese cities today. A very unique aesthetic take on "sprawl". Taipei, definitely has this: not just on a macro level (arbitrary street / burrough layout, overpasses & sidewalks and lack thereof), but on a micro level (placement of stairs, entrances / exits in buildings, consideration (or lack thereof) given to pedestrian flow). In my experience there's pockets of order amid the rampant chaos, like the more recent well-to-do (read: often too expensive for almost everyone) fancy apartment developments in Taipei, Shanghai (or there, also the old French Concession), etc. Yet even there sometimes they only look nice (good finishing & production value) but are still unplanned (lack of human considerations for access, flow and comfort). But overall it's very much like how an organism would grow. Like coral. I'm sure the Chinese have some kind of pithy phrase to describe this kind of style of accreted urban development without any adherence seemingly to centrally mandated planned urban design standards and codes. In my experience, the one exception is Hong Kong, which has commendable amounts of order. The design of the subway stations is particularly notable for rational, sensible and practical consideration given to pedestrian flow. There's very few choke/congestion points because opposing streams of flow are clearly delineated and often routed (albeit sometimes circuitously) away from each other. Very well done, HK! Sometimes what looks to be chaotic, is actually ordered underneath (albeit possessing an organic order): like Jiufen in Taipei, or dense backstreets of Tokyo (both inspirations for the Neo Tokyo in Akira). But mostly, these Chinese-style chaotic urban behemoths are just that: seemingly unplanned chaotic development without order. I'd be interested to compare this to the particular "flavor" of Sprawl you see in both more structured, a la, Paris, and less structured, a la Sydney, non-Chinese cities.

namelosw 3y ago
> This is definitely a characteristic of Chinese culture urban "planning" (operative term is the quotes). > You can see the same "ad hoc"-ratic development "philosophy" at work in Chinese cities today. First, it was 4000 years ago when the Chinese culture was completely different. Other than that, it's still not entirely accurate. If anything, the planning is very diverse or bumps between extremes in China. You can check out Beijing or any historically important town with walls on the map. Most of those cities are carefully designed in square shape, and every important building is facing towards the south. Things are intentionally majestic. Form over practically sometimes. Most of the examples you have mentioned are southern cities, which are probably heavily influenced by the Suzhou garden design. The most famous Suzhou garden is the Humble Administrator's Garden [0]. The idea of the garden is to use a lot of obstacles and irregular shapes to segment zones. In terms of practicality, it creates more "rooms" instead of wasting space with empty squares. In terms of aesthetics, it creates discoverability where every turn provides a different scene. But most importantly, it's carefully non-majestical to not offend the emperor - the holy ruler of the absolute monarchy (who can easily execute any a whole clan at will without justification). You can also feel the uneasiness even in the garden's name itself. But indeed, a lot of Chinese cultured towns are chaotic by nature. My personal take is regions like Europe and Japan with feudal backgrounds are sufficiently decentralized with proper hierarchy, making every piece of land plan things for themselves, the lords, the church, and the guilds can design and interact back and forth. However, China is purely top-down and lacks organizations between the imperial court and individual levels (the feudal system was brutally wiped out 2000 years ago and made very few unsuccessfully comebacks). Any non-imperial organizations like mansions guides are highly discouraged as those are seen as potential threats. Chinese society in modern terms is a "flat organizational structure", and its people are just individuals (clans and families are often forced apart, and shuffled between lands). As a result, we can see towns as official projects are built in orthodox ways, which are the rest are littered with ad-hocness. Actually, in the South, there were also quite some fortresses that were well-designed and typically resided in difficult terrains such as Tulou [1] (man, they look like Apple Park). Because they were large clans living in remote provinces, the imperial court had a hard time dealing with them so often the court didn't bother. > In my experience, the one exception is Hong Kong As a guy who spends most of my time living in Beijing, my first impression of Hong Kong is its chaotic (in a good way, I love it). You probably know Hong Kong is the most important reference for those cyberpunk concept artworks. Singapore, IMO, is more well thought out beforehand in terms of urban planning. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Administrator%27s_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Administrator%27s_Garde... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_tulou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_tulou

perihelions 3y ago

- "a new study by University College London researchers" There is only one UCL researcher, singular, credited in the paper's affiliations section [0]. The other ten authors split between four different Chinese institutions. The UCL press release kind of erases this and feels misleading to me. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4#affiliations https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4#affiliati...

archibaldJ 3y ago
could be exchange students ?
pjc50 3y ago
Eh, it probably has to be a collaboration - doubt it's easy to do fieldwork in China or Chinese history without Chinese support - but that does also feel a bit like reputation washing.

bell-cot 3y ago

> ...a network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches at the Chinese walled site of Pingliangtai dating back 4,000 years to a time known as the Longshan period. Reaction: If the site was "walled" (and not somehow occupied after the builders simply abandoned it), then obviously the engineering skills and social organization for large-scale infrastructure construction did exist. > The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system. Reaction: That "earlier understanding" sounds very comfortable and convenient, if you are an archaeologist with elitist social biases, or dependent on support from members of a social elite, or who is a member of his society's social elite. Wealthy and powerful people rationalizing that poor and oppressed people somehow "needed" them was already an old trope when the first pyramid was built.

duxup 3y ago
I don't understand why ANY determination has to be made about "social elite" or ... "non-social elite" matters. The fact that construction and some planning took place seems to just be evidence that some planning and construction took place.
- dmix 3y ago
  They said the lack of evidence of social stratification in the burial sites and house sizes contrasted with other sites near by. Plus remember this is the headline a news site chose not the scientists. It's very plausible journalists (including university PR teams) care more about social elitism than the archaeologists which is why it's the HN headline. The archaeologist is just using the only evidence they have which is some pipes, a cemetery, and few remaining structures to extrapolate about the community.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  Causal evidence is basically non-existent in archaeology. You are correct that, deductively, we can conclude little more about society from this other than that construction took place. Archaeology attempts to collect all possible evidence and weigh the potential narratives. This can be especially effective at teasing out trends across many sites and cultures. Are we likely getting details wrong if we were to infer a specific society from these trends? Absolutely. We will likely never know most aspects of these cultures—but if that's your goal, even well-documented history will fail us. We know a lot about the lifestyles of european benedictine monks, for instance, because they were excellent record keepers, but we still can't answer basic questions about their lives. Anyway, with this specific article social stratification is one of those things with little ability to extract a narrative from a single data point, but whose importance emerges when collated with others. And it does sound a bit editorialized for modern narratives, but that's probably not intended by the researchers.

refurb 3y ago

Speaking of “no central authority”, I read an article about a city in China that was an industrial hub. The local government was too slow so the road network was entirely built by companies opening factories there. They just created a road they needed, then other companies added to it, etc. It actually worked out pretty well considering nobody was regulating or designing it as a whole.

bogtog 3y ago

> Nature Water Nature has a journal about all things water. From their website: > Nature Water covers all aspects of research that are connected to this evolving relationship between society and water resources. We publish in the natural sciences (primarily Earth and environmental science), in engineering (including environmental, civil, chemical and materials engineering), and in the social sciences (economics, human geography and sociology, among other disciplines) ...anthropology/history is another topic covered here I guess. Something about this feels odd

laci37 3y ago

If they want to show that the infrastructure did not involve central planning, they should search for hacks. Stuff that is not centrally planned always ends up with hack where engineer A's domain meets engineer B's.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
You don’t need central planning to have everyone making things the same style. Think ancient pottery. There wasn’t any authority there yet for generations in some cases potters styled their pots in the exact same way throughout the range of their culture.

einpoklum 3y ago

Two common arguments against Anarchism are that... 1. You can't have Anarchistic societies without advanced technological infrastructure, large production surpluses, group communication etc. 2. You can't have Anarchistic societies with the advent of technology, only primitive Anarchism. This story seems to help undermine a little of both :-)

ilyt 3y ago
Why you think it would be anarchistic society in the first place ?
m4nu3l 3y ago
I recently read "The Machinery of Freedom". It makes a strong case for an anarco-capitalist society. I'm not sure about either of these arguments. The most robust arguments, as far as I can tell, are those relative to common goods (where you can't exclude access to goods/services) and externalities. The book tries to answer most of these questions. While I'm not entirely sold (at lest not yet) I recommend the book. It's not a rant about the Government, instead it goes quite in depth by proposing what anarco-institutions might look like and what kind of society those institutions are likely to produce by looking at historical cases (like Medieval Iceland) and parts of the current system.

calmunism 3y ago

this is a pretty blatant attempt by chinese academics to curry favour with someone in the newly purged CCP by trying to claim xi-style communism existed in ancient china. surprised phys.org is publishing this rubbish.

_lvbh 3y ago
China is a dictatorship. They are claiming that it wasn’t a dictatorship but a communal effort. This goes against the CCP’s narrative
bunabhucan 3y ago
What was the original title? Paper itself has: >In China, the tale of the legendary Great Yu’s heroic taming of floods and the subsequent founding of the Xia Dynasty continues to dominate mainstream scholarly narrative on the formation of China’s first state There must be pressure on academics to hew to a "we are an ancient civilization" narrative.
komali2 3y ago
Xi-style communism is just capitalism with strong state police authority though, what do you mean? This is basically explicit in party doctrine at this point.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

I don’t understand why a pipe network should even imply any authority at all. Modern subway construction in most western cities is routinely stalled due to finding some random victorian era pipe that isn't on any current utility map, probably built by whoever built that block of properties initially, and promptly lost to time in less than a hundred years due to there being no central authority for these things until the most modern cases.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

This reminds me of the book War before Civilization, about the archeological evidence for pre-historical war and the many attempts to dismiss it, to declare walls merely symbolical (symbols of what?), weapons as means of exchange (valuable why?). A water pipe network is evidence of a centralized authority in the same way that a wall or a weapon is evidence of conflict.

advael 3y ago
I think the case for "weapons mean war" or even "walls mean war" (weaker, walls can be built for privacy or defense against theft, but larger ones make a good case) is a lot stronger than the case for "infrastructure implies central authority". Some complex projects can and do get done in unstratified social contexts, and /tons/ of them get done with leadership/authority that only exists within the context of the project itself (and doesn't necessitate being in charge of other things or having more social status in unrelated contexts), which could have been the case for this site Making the claim that the archaeologists are self-evidently wrong here is definitely begging the question. They may well be wrong, but not from logical inevitablity
plugin-baby 3y ago
Aren’t weapons for hunting, and walls for protecting people and maybe livestock from predators?
- dehugger 3y ago
  No one was hunting elk with a sword or keeping a cattle pasture enclosed by a 40 foot high stone wall.
Ebree 3y ago
anybody remembers how alpha function in wolf packs was originally misinterpreted?

WaitWaitWha 3y ago

The article makes the assumption that something like this needs centralized authority instead of a loose confederation of a bunch of tribes, cities and villages.

gwbas1c 3y ago

> Researchers cannot say specifically how the people of Pingliangtai organized and divided the labor among themselves to build and maintain this type of infrastructure. This kind of communal coordination would also have been necessary to build the earthen walls and moat surrounding the village as well. So how can the authors assume there was no government or central planning? There was clearly some kind of planning! Otherwise, the network of pipes would have been inconsistent. Clearly this society had different values and priorities that many of the societies that we live in! I think the lesson should be that we don't need win-lose economics to handle critical infrastructure. Aside: The Inca had a "command economy" that operated in a very similar manner to communism. They had no poor people. Hunger (as far as we know) didn't exist. But the society fell very quickly when the Spanish arrived.

ilyt 3y ago

How is that unexpected or innovative ? you-help-me-I-help-you attitude is staple of small, tight knit communities since forever. Can't exactly build barn single handed easily.

t-3 3y ago

A lot of people in this thread seem to be missing the cultural context: the Chinese king Yu the Great is traditionally credited with building canals (mentioned in the first paragraph of the paper). > In China, the tale of the legendary Great Yu’s heroic taming of floods and the subsequent founding of the Xia Dynasty continues to dominate mainstream scholarly narrative on the formation of China’s first state, albeit with great controversy. The importance of state-organized hydraulic projects and elites’ control of water to the evolution of Bronze Age and early imperial societies is also emphasized in recent archaeological studies of water.

dirtyid 3y ago
Evidence that a small town of 500 (I'm guessing 100-200 households) can self organize some urban infrastructure doesn't contradict narrative of Xia state hydrology that operates on completely different scale and coordinated between different tribes. 9/10 of the archeology team were from PRC and fine making pronouncement that a few hundred people can get together and do home owner association tier stuff. The drama over King Yu / Xia historicitiy is whether his mythos / achievements was game of telephone. Whether he exists at all and hence whether Xia should be considered as China's first dynasty where ruler successfully tamed water. Whether that comes later is matter of debate, but I don't think anyone has seriously suggested a large culture (i.e. millions of people over vast territory) can self organize huge, sprawling capita projects without centralized authority.

splitrocket 3y ago

Go read the Dawn of Everything: centralized authority was and is not a requirement for highly organized cooperation on a massive scale. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...

mikhailfranco 3y ago

A single example is difficult to evaluate, especially when the only context is a walled village, house plans and burials - no written records. However, if you are intrigued by this, read: The Dawn of Everything Graeber & Wengrow

yboris 3y ago
I came to recommend the same book! It's one of my favorite books of my life now - I think more people need to read this. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt... or https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0374157359 https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/...
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I cant recommend this book enough and it should be mandatory reading in colleges Great recommendation
wahnfrieden 3y ago
Mind-bendingly powerful work.

asow92 3y ago

Does anyone else feel like this article is trying to say something without actually saying it?

Ebree 3y ago

There is no need for complex organisation structure, hierarchy or any expert alpha in a group of 500..., mostly relatives. Your family is your basic, natural decision making structure. Then your knowledge and know-how was seemlessly transferred between generations. It's not success of decentralisation but of natural unity of bonds and shared common goals. One for all, all for one. One as all, all as one. For 5000 it would still be workable. What intricate organisation structure, except religious cult rules, did Greek Polis as Athens have?...

gaoshan 3y ago

It's amazing how similar the construction of the pipe segments and the pipe network is to ones I've seen from Roman times. Makes you wonder how many times such a thing has been reinvented over the millennia and how interesting it is that common solutions seem to result despite a (probable?) lack of communication on the situation.

thrashh 3y ago

You know, planning isn't something that is necessarily required or necessarily not required. You plan as much as a situation demands. Presumably in a smaller society with abundant water, you can wing your pipes because it doesn't really matter. A larger society in a desert? Well, that's way different. Inefficiencies add up too much. The real trouble is people who just believe in strong rules when really, you should be looking at your specific situation and using your brain.