Settlement Ecology of 19th and Early 20th Century Farmsteads in Madison County, NY

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This pilot research is using archaeology to examine the role of agriculture, particularly dairy farming, in the formation of historic and modern rural spaces and landscapes in the United States. Our larger goal is to describe and explain what rural is and how it was constructed by and has influenced people throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given the current economic concerns and challenges in the rural United States and the role its inhabitants and their ideologies are cited as having in recent political and social trends (warranted or not), we feel that an anthropological and archaeological explanation of the formation of rural American culture is of vital importance. In this work, we employ GIS and discriminant function analysis to describe the spatial patterning of a sample of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Euro-American farmsteads from Madison County, NY in relation to various environmental and cultural landscape features. This includes an examination of changes over time in general settlement patterns and in particular family landholdings. Our results are contextualized in earlier Haudenosaunee settlement patterns in this area; in the social, political, and economic climates of American society during the period of interest; and in modern settlement and socioeconomic patterns.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24370