Building with Logs

Building With Logs: Western Log Construction in Context. By Jennifer Eastman Attebery. Northwest Folklife Series. (Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 147, preface, illustrations, tables, maps, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth) Studies of traditional building in the eastern United States have been far more numerous than they have been in the west. Although there are a number of excellent scholars of folk architecture in the western United States, we lack the comprehensive view of traditional building that we have for the east. Despite the title, Building with Logs: Western Log Construction in Context does not ofFer a look at log building throughout the west. In fact, Jennifer Eastman Attebery argues against sweeping regional generalizations, favoring instead studies grounded in particular times and places. Building with Logs is a tightly structured contextual study of log construction in two regions in Idaho: the Mormon settlements of the southeast and the mining region of the north Idaho mountains. The vernacular architecture scholar more familiar with eastern patterns of building will be both enlightened and frustrated by Attebery's work. She makes a strong case for the need to understand western building in specific contexts and she clearly demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the building in her home state. However, in contrasting the building of her region with that in the east, Attebery is guilty of the same type of generalizations of eastern building that she argues against for the west. For her information on log construction in the east, she relies heavily on The American Backwoods Frontier, by Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, a worked flawed in both its data and conclusions. Although Attebery notes some of the stereotypical assumptions of Jordan and Kaups, this does not prevent her from using the work as her main source of information about the eastern log technology. Attebery makes much of the Jordan's and Kaups's log house/cabin dichotomy and then concludes that in Idaho there is no such neat division. What she fails to consider is that this division does not truly exist in the east either. In a note to the final chapter of her book, Attebery suggests perhaps eastern uniformity has also been overstated. One wishes she had considered this possibility earlier. Despite the efforts of some vernacular architecture scholars to create a context free terminology, nomenclature invariably varies from study region to study region. Attebery's work would be stronger if she explained her choice of terms. Why, for instance, does she use the term round notching, rather than saddie notching

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Botany, Ecology, and Taxonomy Studies · History