MATERIAL CULTURE

Material culture refers to the pattern of tangible, human-made forms as an indicator of cultural ideas and traditions. While architecture, art, craft, food, and dress are genres represented in material culture, the emphasis in material culture analysis is upon discerning patterns, landscapes, symbols, and behaviors that cross these genres and characterize the built environment. Material culture often refers to social relations among people mediated by objects and, therefore, involves connections to intellectual and social systems in communities and regions.

The period of the new American nation, sometimes referred in historical material culture typologies as the Federal period, is particularly significant for material culture analysis because of the development of a national design alongside the ongoing regional and ethnic folk cultures, often formed out of the hybridization of transplanted traditions and responses to the new environment. The Eastern seaboard that Europeans and Africans encountered was filled with natural wonders, but there were few of the ancient ruins and remains that characterized the Old World. As settlement pushed the frontier westward and crossed natural as well as social borders, residents formed cultural landscapes for a new land and nation. Into the nineteenth century, migrant settlers

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shaped the New World's environments; they were cognizant of their traditions but willing to reshape them for the new land and a sense of community. As citizens of the new American nation, many settlers indeed asked whether a national architecture, art, and food could possibly unite the wide expanse of the American cultural landscape from the commons, maple syrup, and connected farmsteads of New England to the plantations and sorghum of the Deep South.

native and african influences

Drawing on early American historical experience, an assessment of material culture can draw contrasts between American Indian, northern European, and African influences on the landscape. In colonial New England and Virginia, according to this perspective, different material culture systems came into conflict when English settlers confronted Native Americans. Observers noted that the English system was built on the formation of lines and rectangles, while many Indian tribes relied on a base concept of the circle. English architecture was organized on a rectangular foundation and therefore emphasized human control over the landscape. The English conception of time and age was linear, and English settlements were permanent and arranged on a grid with privately owned properties. Indian settlements were mobile and often arranged in circular patterns, their conception of time and age was cyclical, and tribal architecture was based less on human dominance than on a relationship with nature.

Both groups practiced agriculture, and much of the cultural borrowing that occurred between them seems to have been in various forms of food, including tobacco, corn, and maple syrup. The dugout canoe used by European Americans was indebted to Indian technology, but the Europeans did not adopt the crooked knife of the Indians, held in one hand and used by cutting away from the body; Europeans preferred the shaving knife, held in two hands and used by cutting toward the body. Some architectural exchange apparently took place in lumbering areas, where building in bark was borrowed from Indian sources.

Enslaved Africans in the American South were forcibly acculturated to European American material systems, but strong signs of ethnic maintenance are evident in privatized areas of house interiors, crafts, dress, and foodways. An example is the African American head wrap, a cloth tied around the head that emphasized the upward vertical extension of the head, in contrast to the European American scarf and bonnet that was fastened to extend down the back of the neck. Africans adapted the British American quilt form of symmetrical blocks to show the African aesthetics of textile strips across the blanket, often with irregular designs. Evidence of cultural exchange also includes the spread of the Deep South's front porch and long shotgun house, American developments of African origin. African influences are particularly evident in American instrument making. The African banjar, with a skin stretched over a deep gourd, and the instrument's distinctive feature of a plucked short drone string on the neck entered into general American culture during the 1830s.

regions of material culture

The persistence of westward movement through the nineteenth century has informed the idea that the distinctive characteristics of American material culture which developed in that century were based on the clearing of the forested wilderness and a reliance on wood as the primary component of construction. This movement westward helped shape a new national identity, assimilate immigrant groups into the aesthetics of a pioneer American society, and encourage

the removal of indigenous peoples. Particularly for groups that did not plan to return to Europe but, rather, were making a fresh start with a commitment to making a home or establishing a religious or political haven in the New World, settlement was more than just a matter of transplanting the Old World to the New. As can be seen by the migration of log construction from a core area in the mid-Atlantic to the South and West or the wide adaptation of Native American foodways, there was an openness to technologies that fit the environment while conforming to familiar aesthetics and traditions. Nonetheless, the first permanent European settlements in the American experience effectively determined the future course of material culture development and the formation of regions in the new American nation.

Material culture regions emerged from settlements on the Eastern seaboard around four main ports of entry and subsequent migrations. Scholars frequently use the metaphor of a "hearth" to describe the central sustaining influence of settlement patterns through these ports of entry on cultural formation. The New England hearth, with its strong English stamp, was based in the Cape Cod area and from there material culture patterns established by English settlers spread north to New Hampshire and Maine and westward across New York and Michigan. The Chesapeake-Tidewater hearth influenced the movement of material culture across Maryland and Virginia into the upland South. The lowland South hearth, featuring a strong African influence, worked its way through South Carolina and Georgia into the Deep South. The last hearth to form was in Pennsylvania, where Palatine Germans, Swiss Anabaptists, English Quakers, French Huguenots, and Scots-Irish influenced the formation of a plural society and a strong inland Pennsylvania-German culture subregion that spread into the Midwest. While the Pennsylvania cultural hearth is considered to show the most hybridization out of the multiple ethnic influences in the settlement, each of the hearths reveals some cultural hybridization, giving rise to a distinctive American material culture.

New England. In New England, a noticeable settlement pattern brought from England was the town common, or green. It was not prevalent in other regions, and was influenced in New England by the Puritan idea of mutual aid and meeting undergirding a community, stated in documents such as the Mayflower Compact (1620). In some New England towns the common was called the "meetinghouse lot" because it lay near the chief public structure. Originally intended as a common space for grazing the livestock owned by townspeople, it came to signify the corporate spirit that shaped space and structure. Around the green emerged separated, individualized houses, often single-bay, story-and-a-half structures meant for nuclear families; but the green and meetinghouse gathered people together and centered the town. Houses and fields took shape according to community will; land committees assigned acreage and town meetings arranged the placement of mills and blacksmith shops as well as controlling the activities of millers and blacksmiths. Graveyards were often established as common space where the elite as well as ordinary townspeople were buried. The pattern of community spirit and town meetings continued into the founding of the new nation as communally built roads, bridges, and jails multiplied and the tradition of common land became a sign of the new democratic Republic.

The ordinary New England house and barn took advantage of the abundance of forested land to build in wood with an abandon unknown in England. One sign of the new landscape was the replacement of thatch as a roofing material by wooden shingles. The Cape Cod house, consisting of a central chimney and central doorway with a kitchen on one side of the hearth and front and back rooms on the other, was an adaptation of the English hall house. With a lean- to on the back to allow an extension, the house took the shape of a saltbox and became known as a standard regional type. Not far from the house, the English barn reflected the symmetry of the house and was used as a threshing floor and a location for social dances. It had a central entrance on the nongable end and was built flat on the ground. Toward northern New England, one could find connected farmsteads that brought house and barn together in a linear pattern. Not simply a reaction to the cold and snow of harsh New England winters, the line of connected buildings sheltered a south- or east-facing work yard, called the dooryard, from north or west winter winds. It developed even more as a response to multipurpose agricultural production, including a mixed husbandry system of working with a variety of crops and animal products and involvement in home industry for non-agricultural sources of income (e.g., lumbering, clothing, and basketry).

As New Englanders moved west across New York State, the connected farmstead gave way to a dispersed farm-building layout, but the tradition of the workyard remained. A distinctive material landscape emerged particularly in towns along the Erie Canal. There, cobblestones were used as building materials in public and private buildings. In the Hudson Valley, Dutch building skills from the seventeenth century continued in many families and could be discerned in the rise of New World Dutch barns, noticeable in their open interior space and steep-pitched roofs. The farmstead might also have another distinctive form marking a New World Dutch identity: a hay barrack, usually smaller than its Old World counterpart. Consisting of a movable roof resting on four posts, it provided flexible hay storage and reminded English neighbors of ethnic differences in agricultural building design.

Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley, a varied combination of English Quakers and Anglicans, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German Mennonites and Reformed, and Lutherans, among others, participated in William Penn's Holy Experiment, which promised religious tolerance and entrepreneurial opportunity in wooded and mountainous areas thought to be a barrier to settlement. Germans and Scots-Irish enthusiastically sought farmland and put distance between themselves and Quaker control. Visitors remarked on the isolated, self-contained, German-speaking "Dutchland" forming inland and the migration of Scots-Irish and Germans into Virginia's Shenandoah Valley to help form the hardscrabble Appalachian region. The region's mountain dulcimer, for example, was derived from the German zither and was used to accompany old British ballads. The "pot pie" (actually appearing to be more of a stew with dumplings and chicken) associated with Pennsylvania-German cuisine maintained the heavy dough and gravy diet of Central Europe while borrowing the terminology of the British "pie." Farmlands were at first devoted to wheat, but later a corn-pig complex was developed by which corn supplied a grain for baking as well as food for livestock. Many Pennsylvania foods that spread beyond the German population, including sausage, scrapple, and corn mush, relied on this complex. Probably best-known of the German American traditions that spread widely into American material culture were the holiday customs of the indoor Christmas tree, the Easter bunny, and decorated egg tree.

Most notable on the Dutchland landscape was the large, two- or three-level Pennsylvania barn, which featured a German-looking forebay hanging over a sublevel on one side and an inclined bank leading to an entrance on the nongable side. It departed, however, from the forms of many lower Rhineland barns in its nongable entrance, perhaps adapted from English barns. The German house also went through an Anglicization and later an Americanization process. Known for its asymmetrical flurkuchenhaus, or continental German type of dwelling, the house of Rhineland settlers in Pennsylvania usually had an entrance that led on one side directly into the kitchen hearth, which extended to the back of the house. On the other side were a wide front room, or Stube (literally the "stove room"), and the sleeping chamber, or Kammer. The chimney was therefore off center in the house, and befitting the dough cuisine, it often contained an exterior bread-baking oven. In some areas, the oven was in a separate structure. With the spread of English political influence in urbanizing areas, many houses took on more of the symmetry of the Georgian high-style exterior while often retaining the long kitchen and two side rooms. A folk type that developed out of this hybridization throughout the mid-Atlantic region used two front doors and the German-type interior in contrast to the central hallway and four evenly spaced rooms of the Georgian plan. Although the German type persisted into the nineteenth century in many rural areas of the state and in several communal societies such as Ephrata, Bethlehem, and Harmony, the central passage and decorative architectural features of eagles and classical pediments were increasingly in evidence on the two-story, two-room-wide, two-room-deep mid-Atlantic house. The eagles and classical features even appeared on furnishings (e.g., painted dower chests) and illuminated manuscripts (e.g., Taufscheine, or baptismal certificates) alongside the traditional German symbols of the heart, tulip, and distelfink (an ornamental bird design deriving from the German for "goldfinch;" it is often used to represent good luck and happiness and is sometimes shown as two attached birds facing away from each other).

The Chesapeake Tidewater. In the source area of the Chesapeake Tidewater, running from Baltimore down to the coast of North Carolina and inland to the Blue Ridge Mountains, settlers developed a material culture based largely upon the cultivation of tobacco. By the end of the eighteenth century, householders had developed specialized barns for curing their tobacco with loosely jointed sideboards to allow air to flow among the hanging leaves. Barns, dwellings, and fences reflected the transiency of their builders. The tobacco barns and small stables of the Tidewater region appeared astonishingly flimsy to visiting Europeans and northern farmers. If not cultivating tobacco, many southern planters erected log doublecrib barns based on a type found in Central Europe; these barns were found especially further inland into the Tennessee Valley at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As storage needs grew, they expanded into a New World form of the four-crib barn with a central passageway (one of its two passageways was blocked off to provide additional stabling), thus forming a transverse-crib barn.

The settlers in the Tidewater understood themselves as southerners by the contrast of their built landscapes to the corn-pig complexes and multipurpose agricultural systems furthern north. With wood being plentiful, they created a building style adaptable to an agricultural crop that exhausted the soil and forced them frequently to move on to new arable land. Their "worm" fences, made from split rails heaped loosely upon one another in self-supporting zigzag patterns enclosing their fields, could easily be dismantled as well as erected. These fences appeared to waste vast amounts of wood, but they had the advantage of needing no posts or postholes, thus allowing for quick mobility and expansion.

The most distinctive folk house-type to emerge in the Tidewater and spread outward through the South was the one-room-deep hall and parlor house, which developed into the two-story, one-room-deep "I house." Frequently built of wood rather than brick, the hall and parlor were fashioned largely after the English original but were frequently adapted to the hot, humid climate of the South. It had a raised foundation to avoid water damage to the first floor; external chimneys to maximize heat loss; a deep, shady front porch; and frequently a breezeway or central passageway that allowed air to flow through. A peculiarly southern terminology emerged for variations of its two-room-wide, one-room-deep structures that developed in the early nineteenth century, including "dogtrot," "saddlebag," and "double-pen" houses. Some observers have noted that unlike the sturdy bay or room of the North, the southern pen connoted impermanence as well as an adaptation to the expansiveness of the southern landscape. This pattern fostered an American material culture of mobility, which included the development of largewheeled vehicles, use of wood for road coverings, and clothing such as lightweight fabrics and protective bonnets for women and durable broadcloth pants

and riding boots for men. Scholars have speculated whether this mobility also fueled an increased taste for consumer goods, since people on the move demanded ready-made domestic products.

Deep South and Louisiana Purchase. The development of plantations for cotton and rice in the Deep South, meanwhile, included the common layout of the big house and slave cabins behind the big house. In South Carolina the line of slave cabins was known on the rice plantations as "the street" with a white overseer's house at its end. The slave houses exemplified British house-types, typically single-story or hall and parlor cabins with symmetrical fenestration. Some observers have noted that African American carpenters built broad front porches unlike those in Europe and thereby taught their masters about adapting to a hot climate. Slave women learned quilting from European American tradition but applied quilt patterns, especially the ubiquitous strip or string quilt characteristic of West African textiles. Outside the cabin, slaves continued the African tradition of having dry gardens by sweeping dirt to form aesthetic patterns in front yards. In death, African American cemeteries featured mounded dirt graves with shells and broken crockery in keeping with African funerary practices.

Hybridization in New World material culture was particularly noticeable to Americans in the southern portion of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), previously colonized by France and Spain. Along the Mississippi River into New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou, Afro-Caribbean influences could be discerned in the early nineteenth century; along with French and Spanish colonial cultural exchanges, they created a distinctive Creole society. Especially conspicuous on the built landscape was the "shotgun" house, reminiscent of Haitian and West African building styles of one room behind another and a front porch, in contradistinction to the two-room-wide, one-room-deep pattern of British folk house-types. On the American landscape, a third and even fourth room was added. (The kitchen was typically in the rear, the front or common space in the front, and sleeping areas in between.) Characterized by a narrow facade and extreme length, the shotgun might be constructed with wood or brick or with infilling between vertical posts, following French tradition. In keeping with African tradition, the front-to-rear arrangement of the house lacked privacy and encouraged socialization. One American response was the development of the double shotgun house to provide a two-room-wide structure with two front doors reminiscent of the double pen. A room on one side might be removed to create a deep corner porch and main entrance through the social space of the porch, as was common in northern Louisiana. Metal gravemarkers commonly seen in cemeteries also derived from French tradition, but some black Creoles shaped the crosses into heads and animals following Afro-Caribbean tradition.

the federal style

While strong ethnic cultural sources and migration patterns influenced the development of America's regional differences into the nineteenth century and beyond, the creation of the new nation also inspired high-style architecture and furnishings, primarily urban, befitting the Federal vision of a new Republic. Often the Federal period in material culture is known for a classical revival, particularly between 1780 and 1830, leading to the Greek Revival in town naming and architecture between 1820 and 1860. Federal architecture derived from the high-style emphasis on symmetry and order from 1700 to 1780 in the British Georgian style that was commonly used in large civic buildings in the English colonies. Georgian architecture had a rectangular plan, often with symmetrical wings flanking each side. Many American architects who had been abroad celebrated its geometric rationality. Over time the facade and interior decorations became more elaborate and often signified imperial excess. The architecture often had a pedimented gable, frequently with a projecting central pavilion or a portico with two-story columns emphasizing authority and power. Brick walls were commonly laid in a fancy Flemish bond pattern. Also influencing the Federal style were the royal architects Robert Adam (1728–1792) and James Adam (1730–1794), who refined the Georgian style with elegant lines and design motifs including fan ornaments, festoons, urns, wreaths, leaves, and petals.

Although echoes of the Adam style are clearly discernible in the Federal style, the American version is often distinguished by emphasis on classical features, extensive use of glass (glass manufactured in the United States was less expensive than that imported from England), and elegantly elaborate doorways. The Federal style also extended from civic and commercial buildings to brick and brownstone urban row houses in both South and North. Federal taste, promoted by celebrated American figures such as Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Charles Bulfinch (1763–1844), and Robert Mills (1781–1855) favored giant entrance porticos, sometimes domed; a fanshaped light; a central pediment; and a cupola with arched openings. Exemplary Federal buildings, such as the U.S. Custom House and Public Stores in Salem, Massachusetts, built in 1819, reflected a trend of locating a large, nationalistic eagle on or over the central pediment. The U.S. Capitol, completed in 1827, exemplified the symbolic qualities of the style for the nation. It announced in its classical designs the revival of the Republic; while it owed its inspiration to Europe, it contained distinctive American features such as the neoclassical Statue of Freedom with a Native American crest of an eagle's head, feathers, and talons and a shield with thirteen stripes.

Decorative moldings, friezes, pilasters, and quoins used in the large civic buildings were also adopted in ordinary houses, especially in highlighting the pediment, fanlight, and pilasters around the door. In fancier houses, Federal buildings have sidegabled, center-gabled, or hipped roofs, often enclosed or partially enclosed with a balustrade at the line of the cornice. Furniture also exhibited Federal taste, especially in the stylistic treatment of chairs, chests of drawers, and bookcases in inlaid mahogany with shield designs and central wheat sheaves or urns and plain, tapering legs. Although Windsor chairs are known in England as well as America, American craftsmen during the Federal period developed the fanback style among others and had a fondness for the rocking chair that spread in vernacular forms. Other decorative arts taking on a Federal look included mirrors topped with eagles; brass eagle door knockers; classically inlaid tall and banjo clocks; weathervanes with Columbia and other patriotic symbols; neoclassical dresses featuring a highwaisted bodice; carved pilastered mantelpieces; and silver boxes, pots, and bowls festooned with classical wreaths and plumes. In public places and private interiors, particularly in eastern cities for a rising middle class, the Federal style was expressed materially through classical design and American iconography. It influenced the spread southward and northward from America's midland of the design of America's courthouse on the square and the outlying classical "temple" form of the vernacular upright and wing house. As the Federal building marked America's national aspirations in capital cities, the courthouse square and upright and wing house became hallmarks of the American small town in the new nation.

See alsoAfrican Survivals; American Indians: American Indian Ethnography; Architectural Styles; Architecture; Cemeteries and Burial; Clothing; Farm Making; Food; Furniture; Housing; Immigration and Immigrants; Washington, D.C.

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Simon J. Bronner