ABSTRACT
The folk house has provided a compelling interest to North American cultural geography and to an earlier anthropo-geography in Europe. The source of this fascination is clear enough, for the folk house presents a synthesis of pre-modern geography, a tight regional integration of local materials and local traditions in the context of a local physical environment. The connections between culture and environment are writ large in the visible texture of built form. Indeed the folk house is such a primary indicator of the structure of pre-modern geographies that it has frequently been employed to demarcate regional boundaries, or in transatlantic migration, to provide a marker tracing the movement of peoples in the colonization process.
