English Dwellings in North America

Summary

This paper explores the evidence for the form of houses built by seventeenth-century English settlers in North America, and examines how closely they followed and in what ways they differed from contemporary English housing. Did houses adapt to differences in climate? Did they incorporate indigenous techniques? Were they built with a view to withstanding attack? How far can we see English houses as embodying a sense of ethnic culture or national identity? And to what extent was the evident process of regionalisation in seventeenth-century English housing on both sides of the Atlantic affected in North American contexts by interactions with indigenous inhabitants and ways of living? Utilising information from New England and the Chesapeake, this paper draws upon my own research on houses in England to compare divergent and convergent developments in North America and the British Isles.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Perspectives on Inequity: European and Indigenous Voices in the North American Landscape   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-27,02