If you're not familiar with the Hopewell, they are a native North American people group who's culture thrived from 100BC to 500AD. There's evidence that they travelled pretty far and no evidence of agricultural development. So they were nomadic hunter/gatherers who periodically build large geometric earthworks in modern day Ohio. By large, I mean sometimes encompassing 100s of acres and sometimes stretching miles long. By geometric, I mean perfect squares, octagons, circles, parallel lines and semi-circles, all made out of dirt. All of these structures, like many others from the ancient world, have solar and lunar alignments.

It's impressive for hopefully obvious reasons. If you disagree, maybe check out why UNESCO puts them in the same category as the Great Pyramid in Egypt or The Great Wall in China. However, I think there is something that really makes the Hopewell stand out among the ancients. To this day, we have no evidence of centralized leadership. These massive projects, built with millions (7 million to be specific in the case of the Newark Earthworks, one of MANY sites) of baskets of dirt, were not built with forced labor. There are no burials that look like those of kings. There are not even any permanent settlements at the sites. Furthermore, there's no evidence of warfare from this period. The only weapons found seem fine-tuned for hunting and skeletons show signs of natural death. The Hopewell earthworks seem to just be MASSIVE community observatories and complicated math projects. They had a peaceful, decentralized network that covered most of North American which was able to come together periodically in a specific place to take on impressive building/astronomy/mathematics projects.

I visit some of these sites pretty regularly and have started to realize how much of an outlier in human history they are. After a dark age of about 500 years, the Hopwell were replaced by the Mississippians, who were an impressive culture, but more war-like and less egalitarian. Are there other examples of situations like this? I know the early Christian church (as well as the underground one in certain modern countries) seems to be similar in it's decentralized, peaceful, large-scale accomplishments. Bitcoin obviously fits the bill. Are there others? I'm thinking specifically of massive projects, without central power (voluntarily adopted), that require significant physical effort from large groups of people and a vast amount of multi-disciplinary knowledge.