Note 13 — Chapter I · METHOD AND DIVISIONS.
Reading edition
The opinion that the existence of slavery mainly depends on the mode of subsistence is also held by many theorists. According to Morgan “slavery, which in the Upper Status of barbarism became the fate of the captive, was unknown among tribes in the Lower Status in the aboriginal period”. This Lower Status of barbarism begins with “the invention or practice of the art of pottery”. Anterior to the art of pottery was “the commencement of village life, with some degree of control over subsistence”. It ends with “the domestication of animals in the Eastern hemisphere, and in the Western with cultivation by irrigation and with the use of adobe-brick and stone in architecture”13. So slavery, according to Morgan, does not exist before a rather advanced period.