Lewis Henry Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) was an American anthropologist, one of the founders of the discipline. A lawyer in Rochester, New York, he became interested in the Iroquois through a young men's society modeled on their confederacy, was adopted into the Seneca nation and published The League of the Iroquois in 1851, the first scientific study of an American Indian people. His inquiry into kinship terms grew into Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and then Ancient Society (1877), which proposed a universal sequence of social development from savagery to civilization. Friedrich Engels drew on it heavily.