Few anthropologists have made any attempts to explore their own discipline’s prehistory or to have realized its importance. William Adams attempts to rectify this myopic self-awareness by applying anthropology’s own tools to itself while uncovering the discipline’s debt to earlier thinkers. Adams recognizes that many ideas which were anticipated in antiquity have had a lasting influence on anthropological models in particular. Adams has chosen five philosophical currents whose influences have been, and continue to be, very widespread, particularly in North American anthropology: progressivism, primitivism, natural law, German idealism, and ‘Indianology’. This work serves as the basis for the explanation of the true historical and philosophical underpinnings of anthropology and its goals.