Lewis Henry Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan was an American anthropologist, social theorist and railroad lawyer, born in 1818 near Aurora, New York. He is recognized as a pioneer of the study of kinship systems, theorizing that the earliest human domestic institution was the matrilineal clan rather than the patriarchal family, and his comparative kinship analysis shaped what would become a central concern of the discipline. In Ancient Society (1877) he set out a theory of social evolution through three stages of savagery, barbarism and civilization, marked by successive technological advances, building on earlier work including Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and The League of the Iroquois (1851), an ethnographic study of the Haudenosaunee. His ideas influenced Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. He served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1880 and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He died in Rochester, New York, in 1881.