A RETREAT FROM THE WILDERNESS: PATTERN IN THE DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENTS OF SOUTHEASTERN NEW ENGLAND, 1630-1730
Abstract
A central problem lying at the intersection of Folklore and History remains that of locating sources that can augment the inadequacies of written documents in charting the course of seventeenth-century New England society. What American colonial history needs are ethnographic studies that integrate artifacts like houses and furniture, gravestones and pottery, with data gleaned from less biased public records. Rather than limiting its scope to only one group of material survivals, as previous works have done, this dissertation discusses how two different artifact forms--houses and furniture--relate both to one another and to changes in southeastern New England society during its first century of English settlement. Three methods found use in this study: documentary reconstruction, cultural geography, and structuralism. The first was used to isolate a cohort of 439 artisans responsible for the artifacts under consideration, to research house size and function through extant room-by-room inventories, and as a means to recreate a single event: the taking of an estate inventory in 1668. The second method was useful in plotting the distribution of specific house types and details of furniture construction in relation to the demographic habits of artisans and patrons from identifiable regions in England. Finally, the third method helped in establishing meaningful typologies, in observing their evolution through time, and in decoding the symbolic meaning of the inventory event. The study results in showing, within the constraints of a controlled geographic area, the high degree of cognitive congruence between two artifact forms, and, when examined in the context of a single social event, the extent to which they reinforced one another as mechanisms of control in early New England. This study concludes by relating formal change in housing and furniture to shifts in occupational identity among artisans themselves; these latter shifts related to a greater sense of religious and social declension in seventeenth-century communities. Changes in artifact form and the occupational structure of local economy were enactments of social upheaval in southeastern New England that finally coalesced in the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s.
Subject Area
Folklore
Recommended Citation
ST. GEORGE, ROBERT BLAIR, "A RETREAT FROM THE WILDERNESS: PATTERN IN THE DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENTS OF SOUTHEASTERN NEW ENGLAND, 1630-1730" (1982). Dissertations available from ProQuest. AAI8217181.
https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI8217181