Lewis Morgan Book Review

Many people had a hand in the culmination of what contemporary Anthropology is known as today. One of the most forefront pioneers of which was Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan was the antithesis of a well educated middle class gentleman. He came from a privileged background, was a good student, successful lawyer, and a business man. While studying law, he became interested in the study of the American Indian and became an avid defender of Indian rights against unjust government policies, as well as a fighter in the losing battle against the assailment of the Iroquois land. Around 1851 after moving to Rochester, New York to open a very successful law firm with an old classmate, Morgan published League of the Iroquois. This book was the culmination of years of research in partnership with his friend Ely Parker, a Seneca, and is considered one of the earliest prominent ethnographic works.

Knowledge that would be gained by way of inventions and discoveries and by the growth of the ideas of government, of family, and property. Morgan demarcated this evolution of culture into three eras; savagery being the bottom, barbarism being the middle, and civilization being the top and what man would strive for. Taking it even further those stages were then divided by technological inventions including, use of fire, pottery, and weapons in the savage era, horticulture, domestication and cultivation in the barbarism era, and finally the alphabet, writing, and architecture in civilization thus showing a correlation between social progress and technological progress. Morgan viewed this technological progress as the single driving force behind social progress, and believed that any social change has their beginning in the change of