Social Media of Ancient Time

Social Media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage and build relationships.

We only know that  facebook is the first social media platform that we use. Now we have lots of social media networks like instagram, whatsapp, twitter etc. But have you ever heard something about social network before 1990 or 1950 or 1900 or 1800. Yes, i'm right there was a social media network in America in 1600 AD.

Long before the advent of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, early Mississippian Mound cultures in America's southern Appalachian Mountains shared artistic trends and technologies across regional networks that functioned in similar ways as modern social media, according to a study.


The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that strong social connections between common people have always played an important role in helping each other  against the angry and ruling classes. 
These communication helped the ancient people to share their messages without coming in the eyes of ruling classes.

According to Jacob Lulewicz, lecturer at the Washington University in the US, between 1,200 and 350 years ago people had their own information sharing networks in North America.

"Our study found a way to reconstruct these indigenous communication networks. Our analysis shows how these networks laid the groundwork for Native American political systems that began developing as far back as 600 AD," Lulewicz said.
Those social networks helped unite friends and families in dozens of Native American villages well before arrival of European explorers.

They used to communicate with the help of pottery shreds. The study provides a detailed chronological map of new pottery techniques signified connections between these communities.

Pottery Shreds

The ceramics database includes 2,76,626 shreds from 43 sites across eastern Tennessee, and 88,705 shreds from 41 sites across northern Georgia, researchers said. 

The collection represents pottery created between 800 and 1650 AD, a period that saw the gradual emergence and later decline of powerful chiefdom that controlled wide networks of villages in the region, they said.

The study focuses on villages clustered around the site of Etowah in Bartow County, Georgia, an important Mississippian community that included several low earthen mounds with large ceremonial buildings.

The findings suggest that the ruling elites drew their power from social networks created by the masses. 

A map of the southern Appalachian region, with the archaeological sites used in the study

The emergence of powerful Native American chiefdom and the centralized leadership, elaborate religious movements and institutionalized inequality that came with them, he said, were built upon foundations created by the wider, preexisting social networks of common people.

Such systems proved to be more stable and durable than any interactions dictated by elite chiefs, researchers said.