was an early anthropologist who sought to organize vast quantities of data about the diversity of world cultures that were being accumulated through colonial and missionary enterprises.

The correct answer is Lewis Henry Morgan

Recognized as one of the founders of modern scientific anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan was the first to study kinship systems and devised an ambitious theory about man's cultural evolution.

Morgan developed a general theory of the cultural evolution of society, which would take place in three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization, each marked by the predominance of certain techniques and institutions. The acquisition of a new technique or capacity would mark the end of one stage and the beginning of the next. Thus, the invention of ceramics started barbarism, and writing, civilization.

Although Morgan's theories have revealed themselves over time to be excessively linear and incomplete, his proposal of direct examination of primitive communities and the integration of different cultural, economic and historical factors lent anthropology rigor.