All too often, historical archaeology in rural contexts deals with aspects
of the economy manifest in the material culture that are anomalous and
ambiguous.  Farmers sometimes are not really farmers and agro-industrial
sites extend beyond the bounds of production and away from the constricted
context of the archaeological site. There's no archaeology in the material
below and in the linked webpage, but there are some important relevant
issues for historical archaeologists working in rural contexts.
 
The New York Catskills are among the northernmost of the Appalachian
Mountains.  During the first half of the nineteenth century, hemlock sole
leather tanners diffused through the region (Greene, Ulster, Delaware,
Sullivan and Schoharie counties, New York) crystallizing a pattern of
settlement, industrialization and deforestation that subsequently was
played-out in Pennsylvania's Pocono and Allegheny mountains(after 1850) and
in the mountains of West Virginia (after ca. 1890).  Craft and capital
intimately and intricately were tied to kinship.  Tanning families in search
of tanbark engaged in a complex system of vertical integration and
geographic distribution to secure tanbark and to ensure the success of
increasing numbers of family members entering the craft and which brought a
vibrant cash economy into isolated mountain valleys well before the outbreak
of the Civil War.
 
I am in the process of reworking my 1996 dissertation on the diffusion of
Catskills tanners into Pennsylvania and have completed another chapter (on
the expansion of one family, the Palens, into Sullivan County, NY after
1832).  The draft paper derived from that chapter is loaded at my website:
<http://www.city-net.com/~davidsr/palens/sullivan.htm>.  Comments and
criticism are welcomed.
 
David Rotenstein
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David S. Rotenstein, Ph.D., RPA
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
WWW: http://www.city-net.com/~davidsr/crm.htm
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
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