The central tenets of Morgan’s classic are stated in the opening paragraph: The latest investigations respecting the early condition of the human race are tending to the conclusion that mankind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulation of experimental knowledge. As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still other portions in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a
natural as well as necessary sequence of progress. (1877:3)
Thus the different portions of humanity—whether in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, or the Americas—represented different points along a common line of progress. “The history of the human race,” Morgan observed, “is one in source, one in experience, and one in progress” (1877:vi). Savagery in one culture,
barbarism in another, and civilization in a third were not the result of different races being genetically condemned to backwardness or development; they were simply societies perched at different stages on a common progression of cultural evolution.
Morgan writes, It may be remarked finally that the experience of mankind has run in nearly uniform channels; that human necessities in similar condition have been substantially the same; and that the operations of the mental principle have been uniform in virtue of the specific identity of the brain of all the races of mankind.(1877:8)
For Morgan the terms “savagery,” “barbarism,” and “civilization” represented well-defined stages of progress measured by four sets of cultural achievements: (1) inventions and discoveries, (2) the idea of government, (3) the organization of the family, and (4) the concept of property. The lines of progress were clearest in the field of inventions and discoveries because certain inventions necessarily preceded others (fire before pottery, hunting before pastoralism). Therefore, Morgan chose technological developments as the primary but not sole “test of progress” marking the different stages of cultural evolution.
Morgan divided the earliest stage, or “ethnical period,” into “Lower Status of Savagery,” which began with the earliest humans and ended with knowledge of fire and fishing; “Middle Status of Savagery,” which began with fire and fishing and lasted until the invention of the bow and arrow; and “Upper Status of Savagery,” which began with the bow and arrow but ended with the development of pottery.
The invention of pottery marked the divide between savagery and barbarism. Lower Status of Barbarism began with pottery and ended with the domestication of animals in the Old World and the irrigated agriculture and substantial architecture in the New World. Those developments marked the Middle Status of Barbarism, which lasted until the invention of smelting iron ore. The Upper Status of Barbarism began with iron smelting and continued until the development of a phonetic alphabet, which marks the development of “Civilization,” a stage that continues, without additional subdivisions, to this day.
Morgan argued that the “successive arts of subsistence” were the foundation on which “human supremacy on the earth depended,” suggesting that “the great epochs of human progress have been identified, more or less directly, with the enlargement of the sources of subsistence” (1877:19). This materialist basis of cultural evolution has been considered Morgan’s principal legacy by subsequent evolutionists such as Marx, Engels, Leslie White , Marvin Harris , and Eleanor Leacock . And yet, Ancient Society is not a coherently materialist theory since it incorporates mentalistic explanations for changes in other arenas, such as government, family, and property (see Service 1985:48–53)