Excerpt

In the American Southwest, in a remote canyon between Albuquerque and Farmington, New Mexico, lie the ruins of the cultural hub of the ancient pueblo peoples who populated the region roughly between AD 900 and 1150.

Chaco Canyon was the architectural and social masterpiece of its time, the region’s center of trade, religion, and social organization. Its buildings were the largest in North America until the nineteenth century. Some appear to have been constructed so as to be aligned with solar and lunar cycles. A system of symmetrically radiating roads connected Chaco with the rest of the region.

Chaco was the result of decades or centuries of planning and building, and many of Chaco’s features go well beyond those functionally related to survival. What purpose do these features serve, if not simply to provide shelter and security for Chaco’s inhabitants?

To scholars, it’s clear Chaco’s design played a central role in setting up, maintaining, and reinforcing the complex social organization of the peoples who constructed it.

Human history is full of similar examples. The Balinese water temple system that emerged in the ninth century features iconic, stylized monuments and evolved rituals that optimize planting cycles and water distribution. The opaque voting protocol invented by Venetian families in the 1500s helped ensure tamper-free
elections of their doge.

Humans have been attempting to engineer social outcomes presumably since language evolved and made feasible the coordination of many individuals. It began when groups of hunter-gatherers decreed the first rules of social interaction, was advanced when the first agricultural societies set down regulations for water use and distribution, and has now expanded in contemporary society to our online behavior.

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