You will have a very hard time defining "progress" in a way that is relevant to academic history. It's an extremely loaded term that suggests superiority and inferiority of certain cultures, and that all societies and cultures are somewhere on a linear continuum of "progress" leading to some final point of human development.

Consider for example the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. According to contemporary European accounts, the residents of the city were appaled by the poor hygeine of the first Europeans they encountered. So was Tenochitlan "ahead" of early modern European cities? If European ethnographic accounts are to be believed, it was certainly cleaner. This brings to light the issue of using words like "advanced" or "progress." There's no satisfactory way for a historian to declare either the Aztecs or the Spanish superior or inferior, advanced or not advanced. The Aztecs were clean, but they practiced human sacrifice. The Spanish had guns, but they believed in witchcraft and they smelled god awful. Does gunpowder make a civilization advanced or does cleanliness? Or something else? Who gets to decide what factors indicate progress or lack thereof?