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Development of culture and society from simple to complex forms.
Europeans had sought to explain the existence of various
primitive societies, some believing that such societies
represented the lost tribes of Israel, others speculating that
primitive peoples had degenerated since the time of Adam from an
originally barbarous to an even lowlier savage state. European
society was taken to epitomize the highest state of existence,
civilization. In the late 19th century, Edward Burnett Tylor and
Lewis Henry Morgan elaborated the theory of unilinear evolution,
specifying criteria for categorizing cultures according to their
standing within a fixed system of growth of humanity as a whole
and examining the modes and mechanisms of this growth. A
widespread reaction followed; Franz Boas introduced the culture
history approach, which concentrated on fieldwork among native
peoples to identify actual cultural and historical processes
rather than speculative