Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization

Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, Edward Burnett Tylor's 1865 study from John Murray, is a foundational text in the early anthropology of religion and culture, predating Tylor's better known Primitive Culture and helping establish comparative method in the study of custom and belief. Its authority is historical: Tylor is a founding figure of the discipline, and the book's ideas shaped a century of subsequent anthropological theory. Its limit is exactly that age: Victorian evolutionary anthropology's ranking of cultures has been thoroughly rejected by the modern discipline. Cite it as a foundational historical document of the field's own origins, never as current anthropological consensus.