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

In aboriginal America, as already observed, kinship through females only was the rule, The exogamous clan in ancient America. and exogamy was strictly enforced,—the wife must be taken from a different clan. Indissoluble marriage, whether monogamous or polygamous, seems to have been unknown. The marriage relation was terminable at the will of either party.[71] The abiding unit upon which the social structure was founded was not the family but the exogamous clan.