well you ensured my uselessness this afternoon and I’m about 8 tabs deep on the Côte d’Ivoire

great stuff, thank you

If you’d like a deeper dive into this topic then there’s a book called The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

That makes me think of shit like Karahan Tepe or Poverty Point. How would they organize to build cool shit without a centralized authority? Or maybe it was a centralized authority but it wasn’t hierarchical?