Ancient Society
Ancient Society is an 1877 book by the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan. Building on the data about kinship and social organization presented in his 1871 "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family", Morgan develops his theory of the three stages of human progress, i.e., from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Contemporary European social theorists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were influenced by Morgan's work on social structure and material culture, as shown by Engels' "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" (1884). The concept of progress. The dominant idea  of Morgan's thought is that of "progress". He conceived it as a "career" of social "states" arranged in a "scale" on which man has "worked his way up" from the "bottom". Progress is "historically true of the entire human family", but not uniformly. Different "branches" of the family have evidenced "human advancement" to different conditions. He thought the scale had universal application or "substantially the same in kind", with "deviations from uniformity ... produced by special causes". Morgan hopes therefore to discern "the principal stages of human development". Morgan arrived at the idea of a society's progress in part  through analogy to individual development. It is an "ascent" to "human supremacy on the earth". The prime analogate is an individual working his way up in society; that is, Morgan, who was well read in classics, relies on the Roman "cursus honorum," rising through the ranks, which became the basis of the English ideas of career and working your way up, to which he blends in the rationalist idea of a "scala," or ladder, of life. The idea of growth or development is also borrowed from individuals. He proposed that a society has a life like that of an individual , which develops and grows. He gives the analogy an anthropological twist and introduces the comparative method coming into vogue in other disciplines. Lewis names units called "ethna," by which he means "inventions", "discoveries" and "domestic institutions". The ethna are compared and judged higher or lower on the scale, pair by pair. Morgan's ethna appear to comprise at least some of Edward Burnett Tylor's cultural objects. Morgan mentions Tylor a number of times in the book. Morgan's standard of higher or lower is not clearly expressed. By higher he appears to mean whatever contributes better to control over  the environment, victory over competitors, and spread of population. He does not mention Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, but Darwin referred to Morgan's work in his own. The lines of progress. The substitutions of ethna better than the previous follow several "lines of progress". The ethnical periods. Morgan rejects the "Ages of Stone, of Bronze, of Iron", the Three-Age System of pre-history, as being insufficient characterizations of progress. This theory had been explicated by J. J. A. Worsaae in his "The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark", published in English in 1849. Worsaae had built his work on  the foundation of evidence-based chronology by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, whose "Guideline to Scandinavian Antiquity" ("Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed") (1836), was not published in English until 1848. The two works were highly influential to researchers in Great Britain and North America. Morgan believed the prehistoric stages as defined by the Danish were difficult to distinguish, as they overlapped and refer only to material types of "implements" or tools. In addition, Morgan thought they did not fit the evidence he was finding among Native American societies in North America, in which he had closely studied social structure as an indicator of  stages of civilization. Based on the "lines of progress", he distinguishes "ethnical periods", which each have a "distinct culture" and a "particular mode of life" and do not overlap in a region. He does admit to exceptions and a difficulty of determining precise borders between periods. Scientific archaeology was being developed at this time; Morgan did not have the techniques of stratigraphy or scientific dating available, but based his arguments on linguistic and historical speculation. (Thomsen and Worsaae are credited with the foundation of scientific archaeology, as they worked to have controlled excavations in which artifacts could be evaluated by  which were found together: the beginning of stratigraphy. This evidence-based system was the start of chronological dating in archeology.)