Dwelling in Space through Knowledge of Place: Building on Epistemological Understandings of the Seventeenth-Century British Atlantic

Abstract

This paper explores colonial English epistemologies of weather and climate through an analysis of the dwelling spaces of the 17th-century Chesapeake region. Using Ingold’s notion of the “weather-world,” I consider early modern perceptions of air, temperature, and the body in order to address the various ways in which colonial landscapes were defined and shaped. Employing an analytical method known as buildings information modeling (BIM), I investigate the implications of 17th-century pit-house construction in an attempt to understand the ways in which individuals engage with an environment, constructing and dwelling through a particular way of knowing the world. This analysis ultimately demonstrates how archaeological evidence speaks to the material ways in which people manipulate their experience of place, not only to experience their surroundings, but to shape them to fit the epistemological context that creates a knowledge of place.