The Anarchist Archipelago

1250 words, 5 minute read

In an earlier post, we talked about the ‘advanced’ (Neolithic) Vinca civilization that thrived for a millennium along the Danube c. 5000 BCE. We talked about their extraordinary feats of social engineering achieved without resort to any form of central government:

Ø  Urban Planning. Residential areas are set apart from areas designated for community events, commerce, and manufacture. Within the residential quarter, buildings are arranged in symmetrical patterns, reflecting both pre-planning and a high level of cooperation.

Ø  Division of Labor. Hunting, agriculture, manufacturing and trade are functions performed by specified individuals but without any suggestion of coercion or class/caste differentiation.

Ø  Social Justice. A decentralized political structure, a relatively flat wealth distribution curve, and little evidence of gender inequality. Men and women have distinct roles but those roles do not appear linked to any social or economic disparities.

Ø  Gender Flexibility.  Men and women were buried in different positions with different artifacts, but several recently opened graves contained skeletons of folks of both genders buried opposite to their birth physiology.

Now archeologists have discovered another civilization, this time in pre-Hispanic Columbia, that appears to resemble the Vinca in several important ways. An article by Andrew Paul published Aug 11, 2026 in Popular Science presents the evidence:

“The La Mojana field systems in Colombia’s wetlands are some of the largest examples of monumental ancient engineering in South America. Encompassing an area about as large as Grand Canyon National Park, the network of canals and raised farming ridges are so vast that they’re even visible from airplanes.”

How so?

“Instead of a centralized chiefdom commanding their citizens to build the field systems, an international research team now believes the hydraulic agricultural arrangement was designed, built, and maintained by local family cooperatives. What’s more, they likely achieved their goals much faster than expected…

“Researchers at the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH) and Spain’s University of Santiago de Compostela then calculated the labor and social structures needed to construct such a system. Factors included how much earth was moved, local geological information, the era’s technology, population size, and indigenous working traditions.

“ We are confident that one of these canal-ridge systems could have been built in less than two months’, said Jasmine Vieri, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge and study co-author.”

Sidebar #1: Roman Catholic social theory has long emphasized the value of Subsidiarity – getting the job done as close to home as possible, at the lowest rung of social organization beginning with the nuclear and extended families. La Mojana culture seems to embrace this value, without any ‘cross contamination’ from European Christianity…yet.

“These field systems are so impressive that people have assumed they were achieved by hierarchical chiefdoms. Our data tells a very different story’. Construction began during the first centuries BCE, and local pre-Hispanic communities continued to rely on these field networks until about the 11th century CE.

“Our study is the first to show that these sustainable solutions can be organized locally and collectively’, said study author and ICANH archaeologist Fernando Montejo Gaitán.”

Sidebar #2: Many folks who are philosophically comfortable with the Anarchist ideal nevertheless concede that such a system might be too unwieldy and inefficient to be practical at scale and that the resulting social structure might be too fragile to survive the inevitable bumps.

The La Mojana prove the faint of heart wrong…on both counts. Voluntarism is actually more efficient (“2 months” above)! And re fragility, the Vinca social structure survived 1,000 years; in all of European history, its longevity is rivaled only by Rome. La Mojana society thrived for 10,000 years - 20^th century dictators, eat your hearts out!

La Mojana is the third oasis in our Anarchist Archipelago. Several millennia after the ultimate demise of Vinca civilization, a foundling led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, across the Sinai wilderness (40 years), into Canaan, ‘the land of milk and honey’. Under the guidance of Moses’ successor, Joshua, the Israelites chose Theocratic Anarchism as their form of social organization: “We will serve the Lord our God and obey (only) him.” (Joshua 24: 24)

And so, for 250 years, Israel enjoyed ‘peace and prosperity’ without the burden of a bureaucracy, a police force, or a standing army. The social structure consisted of a council of elders (advisory) supporting a series of Judges, unelected, unappointed, unrelated leaders who emerged ad hoc to respond to periodic crises.

Perhaps the most famous of these Lone Rangers was Judge Gideon . The Book of Judges details his unlikely and unwilling rise to power, his military successes, and his ‘abdication for the ages’.

Following one such triumph, the Israelites proposed to make him King and make his family an hereditary dynasty; Gideon was horrified: “I will not rule over you, nor shall my son; the Lord will rule over you…(and so it was that) for 40 years the land was at peace.” (Judges 8: 23)

Brief by the standards of the Vinca and La Mojana, but long by the standards of modern Europe, the period of Judges lasted more than two centuries. But unlike their Neolithic predecessors, the Judges left a ‘written transcript’ of their successes and failures, and, as far as I know, they are the only group mentioned in the Bible that had its own slogan, repeated verbatim 4 times in The Book of Judges:

“In those days Israel had no king. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (17:6, 18:1, 19:1, 21:25)

Unfortunately, folks are fickle and finally, c. 1050 CE, they got their wish: Judge Samuel yielded to public pressure and anointed Saul Israel’s fist king, but not without a Herculean effort to persuade otherwise:

“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.

“He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.” (1 Samuel 8: 11 – 17)

As is often the case, both sides of this debate proved right. Saul was deposed by David who was succeeded by Solomon: unquestionably Israel’s Golden Age. And then the wheels came off. As Samuel had predicted, and as is inevitable, the monarchy became corrupt. The ‘Deep State’ became its own client constituency and half a millennium later, Israel’s leading citizens were living in exile, imprisoned in Babylon.

Who can resist the temptation to say, “Told you so!”