Note Back to Main Text — Chapter I · ANCIENT AMERICA.

Throughout all the earlier stages of culture, and even into the civilized period, we find society organized with the clan for its ultimate unit, although in course of time its character becomes greatly altered by the substitution of kinship in the paternal, for that in the maternal line. By long-continued growth and repeated segmentation the primitive clan was developed into a more complex structure, in which a group of clans constituted a Phratry and tribe. phratry or brotherhood, and a group of phratries constituted a tribe. This threefold grouping is found so commonly in all parts of the world as to afford good ground for the belief that it has been universal. It was long ago familiar to historians in the case of Greece and Rome, and of our Teutonic forefathers,[67] but it also existed generally in ancient America, and many obscure points connected with the history of the Greek and Roman groups have been elucidated through the study of Iroquois and Algonquin institutions. Along with the likenesses, however, there are numerous unlikenesses, due to the change of kinship, among the European groups, from the female line to the male.