Thinking about Thinking: Morgan’s Mind and Material Culture

Courtesy of Rare Books, Special Collection and Preservation, University of Rochester.

Authored by: Rebecca Wright.

These stone hammers, which are part of the Rochester Museum & Science Center’s Lewis Henry Morgan Collection, were used by either the Mandan or the Arickaree people of what is today North Dakota. Morgan acquired them in 1862 on his final journey up the Missouri River, during which he collected information about different Native peoples for his kinship studies.

In an 1868 report to the New York State Cabinet of Natural History titled The Stone and Bone Implements of the Arickarees, Morgan described an abandoned village on the east side of the Missouri river, as well as a number of tools, most made of stone and bone as the title suggests, that he collected there. The Mandan had abandoned the village after a smallpox epidemic decimated their population, leading the survivors to move north and join with traditional allies. Not long after the Mandan left, the village was taken over by the Arickaree. The Arickaree later moved after smallpox and the burning of a nearby fort left them vulnerable to attack by the Dakota, whom Morgan describes as hereditary enemies of the Arickaree.

To Morgan, the collection of objects that he assembled at this site represent one of the few societies still using “Stone Age” implements and whose way of life had been relatively untouched by European trade and influence. Morgan, like others before him, used technology in order to place a society within one of several successive ethnological periods, which he outlines in Ancient Society. Societies, such as the Mandan and Arickaree, that have been left undisturbed for long periods of time were especially fascinating to Morgan, because they allowed him an opportunity to study the technological progress of groups that had developed tools based on their own needs. He admired the ability of these stone hammers to serve many of the same purposes as more specialized metal tools created by “civilized” societies that Morgan regarded as having made more technological progress.