Item Detail
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19628
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0
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0
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English
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The Origins of Traditional Mountain Western Culture as Revealed in the Built Landscape
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Austin, Texas
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The University of Texas
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Ph.D.
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"Scholars have long debated whether the traditional rural culture of the North American West developed indigenously, as the product of pioneer adaptation to a distinctive physical environment, or whether it diffused into the region largely unaltered from the eastern United States and Canada. Most fundamentally, these scholars have asked, "What is the West?" In answering this question from the perspective of the cultural-historical geographer, the present study examines the greater artifacts of the mountain western built landscape, especially its log carpentry, folk houses, barns, fences, and hay-related material culture. Surveyed firsthand during extensive fieldwork from New Mexico to Alaska, these artifacts speak directly toward the issue of western cultural origins when compared to those of eastern North America and when considered in the context of the adaptive systems in which they were employed. Based on these comparisons and considerations, the western landscape reveals mixed cultural origins. To be sure, certain artifacts, including a number of fence types, most barns, and virtually all haying equipment, indicate a western origin, or cultural adaptation. Many other elements of material culture, however, including the majority of log carpentry forms, most folk house types, and several varieties of fencing, reveal cultural diffusion from known eastern source areas, most notably the Upper South and the Lower Midwest. In other words, they indicate a continuity of eastern culture. In fact, because western innovations were relatively rare and exhibited localized distributions in contrast to diffused eastern artifacts, which occurred more frequently and yielded region-wide distributions, the cultural origins of the West appear more eastern than western. Evidence further suggests that multiple mountain western culture regions, rather than a single monolithic one, existed in the early settlement era. These included the Anglo-American ranching area of the Rocky Mountains, the Mormon agricultural area of the Great Basin, and the Anglo-American mining area of Alaska and the Yukon." [Author's abstract]