Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines

Lewis Henry Morgan

University of Utah Press, 2003 - History - 281 pages

A classic, available again.

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) was trained as a lawyer, but in the second part of his life he focused his attention on the emerging science of ethnography.

Covering areas of North and Central America, Morgan's last book, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines was the first to regard a set of problems that is still currently debated: what does domestic architecture show anthropologists and archaeologists about social organization, and how does social organization combine with a system of production technology and ecological adjustment to influence domestic and public architecture? As William Longacre makes clear in the new introduction, the development of anthropological archaeology was profoundly affected by this book, and its impact continues to resonate.

Demonstrating a lack of ethnocentrism rare for his day, Morgan gathered most of his own data from the field and from a gigantic correspondence. The result is a lively, readable work that is still fascinating and instructive today.

About the author

Lewis Henry Morgan, an American lawyer, studied, lived with, and was eventually adopted by the Iroquois Indians in New York State; this experience made him a self-taught anthropologist who went on to make substantial contributions to the field. His evolutionary theory of the family has been largely abandoned, but his Ancient Society (1877) became a classic in Marxist literature. Its account of how culture had actually evolved was the best available during the mid-nineteenth century. Although Karl Marx (see also Vol. 4) died before he was able to write a planned book about Morgan, Friedrich Engels (see also Vol. 4) wrote The Origin of the Family: Private Property and the State in 1884 largely on the basis of Morgan's work. Morgan was also the first to publish a treatise on Australian kinship.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines
• Author: Lewis Henry Morgan
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: University of Utah Press, 2003
• ISBN: 0874807549, 9780874807547
• Length: 281 pages
• Subjects: History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies); History / Indigenous Peoples in the Americas; House & Home / General; Political Science / Public Policy / Social Policy; Social Science / Anthropology / General; Social Science / Archaeology; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / American / Native American Studies; Social Science / Sociology / General