Britannica Sources used in this answer

What stages of cultural evolution did Lewis Henry Morgan propose in Ancient Society?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Tarasco handicrafts — Primitive culture Handicrafts of the Tarasco people on display in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico.

In his 1877 work Ancient Society, American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan proposed a unilinear theory of cultural evolution consisting of seven distinct stages.12

He categorized the progression of human society as follows:

Savagery: Divided into lower, middle, and upper stages.1
Barbarism: Divided into lower, middle, and upper stages.1
Civilization: The final stage of development.1

Morgan posited that these stages were driven primarily by advancements in food production and technology. He argued that human history followed a uniform path across all continents, allowing researchers to use contemporary societies as proxies for the ancestral states of more "advanced" cultures.21

While Morgan’s focus on the role of technological and material change in social evolution remains historically significant, his specific framework of unilinear cultural evolution is no longer accepted in modern anthropology, as it relies on outdated assumptions about the "progress" of human societies.12