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translations from Greek. In 1685 de Montfaucon published an account of the excavation of a megalithic stone tomb at Cocherel that contained polished stone axes. He ascribed the tombs to a people who had no knowledge of iron, and in passing referred to the possibility of a three-age sequence—stone, copper, and iron—of human development. In reaching this conclusion he was undoubtedly influenced by contemporary archaeological research in England and Scandinavia.

From 1698–1701 de Montfaucon worked in the Vatican Library in Rome, publishing his travels and experiences in Diarium Italicum. For the next twenty years he prepared his monumental fifteen-volume L’antiquité expliquée et representée en figures (1722–1724), comprising an enormous amount of source material and iconographical data from the ancient world. His aim was to illustrate and describe the monuments of antiquity in order to explain them and attempt to reconstruct the past. It was both a scientific and an educational work—and de Montfaucon suggested that a serious student could take up to two years to do it justice. His work was to have an enormous impact on subsequent antiquarian studies and the beginnings of an archaeology based on illustration and interpretation.

Tim Murray

References

Schnapp, A. 1996. The Discovery of the Past. London: British Museum Press.

Morgan, Lewis Henry

(1818–1881)

Born in New York State, Lewis Henry Morgan studied law at Union College in Schenectady and moved to Rochester in 1844. He became wealthy through investments in railways and iron smelting and was thus able to devote all of his time to his scholarly interests after 1860. Morgan took part in the literary and scientific societies of his day, joining the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856, presiding over the newly created anthropology section in 1873, and becoming the association’s president in 1879. He was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1875.

Morgan’s passion was for Native American Indian ethnology, and his first book, League of the Iroquois (1851), is still the best ethnography on the subject. He undertook fieldwork among the Ojibwa in Michigan, out of which grew modern kinship studies such as those outlined in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871). In Ancient Society, or Researches in the Line of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877), the influence of the evidence of human antiquity recently discovered in Europe moved Morgan in the direction of evolutionism.

The impact of his work was enormous—Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, John Lubbock, and Charles Darwin all read and considered it, and in the next generation, Lorimer Fison, the Australasianist; Adolph Bandelier, Mesoamerican and southwestern archaeologist and historian; and john wesley powell, head of the Bureau of American Ethnology and leading classifier of Native American languages in his day, were all Morgan’s students and successors. He was also a major influence on the outstanding anthropologists W.H.R. Rivers, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Tim Murray

Morley, Sylvanus Griswold

(1883–1948)

The son of a former military academician and mine owner, Sylvanus Morley corresponded with frederic ward putnam of Harvard University’s peabody museum from the age of fifteen. To please his father, Morley first studied to be a civil engineer but then began studying anthropology at Harvard. His earlier fascination with Egypt gave way, under Putnam and Alfred Tozzer’s encouragement, to an abiding interest in the Maya of Central America.

After his graduation from Harvard Morley was sent by the archaeological institute of america to the Yucatán in mexico to study linguistics. There he met Mesoamerican archaeologist Edward Thompson at the site of chichén Itzá.