Adaptation and Innovation: Archaeological and Architectural Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake

At the close of the seventeenth century, the Chesapeake was a mosaic of landscapes, building forms, and subsistence activities, layers of cultural patterns imposed by adaptation and innovation. Historians have suggested two main factors to explain the seemingly transitory character of the built Chesapeake environment: the demographic chaos of the region's beginnings as well as the continued instability that troubled it until the second half of the century and the failure to create a diversified economy. Here, Graham et al chart change in architectural technology, architectural ornament, and the spatial arrangement of farmhouses and farmsteads, taking advantage of evidence unearthed during the past thirty years.