ABSTRACT. As Fred Kniffen observed, vernacular buildings identify culture and record our relationships with physical and social environment. Influenced by Kniffen, twentieth-century cultural geographers used spatially correlated log homebuilding attributes as diagnostics. The present study used a qualitative meta-study approach to evaluate studies citing such correlations in the eastern temperate forests of North America. Forty-two studies involving sixty-three geographic entities and twenty-two attribute types were evaluated. The meta-study's findings were consistent with an Eastern Woodlands regional model described by Kniffen, Terry Jordan, and Wilbur Zelinsky. A majority of the spatially correlated attributes involved building materials, cited cultural and/or environmental influences to explain their findings, and cited correlations at state/province or county scales. Today, identification of building culture undoubtedly continues to offer potential guidance to sustainability efforts, and, although untapped, vernacular building continues to offer potential as a key diagnostic. Keywords: cultural geography, qualitative meta-study, vernacular architecture, building culture, sustainability.When Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups (1987) critiqued Fred Kniffen's (1965) assertion that folk housing provided the most reliable diagnostic of North American occupancy patterns and culture 1 diffusion, they questioned Kniffen's methodology rather than his conclusions. Many researchers, including Jordan, had followed Kniffen's example in applying material-geographic methods to investigating settlement patterns. Jordan and Kaups argued that Kniffen's results had only been descriptive. In their view, failure to recognize artifacts in their cultural and ecological context had resulted in a failure to explain cultural origins and, therefore, patterns of diffusion.2 The criticism was valid, although it is unclear if Kniffen thought that he had proved his assertion. After all, the first geographic task-identifying spatial variance-is descriptive and does not offer an explanation. It is undeniable that vernacular buildings both structure and record our relationship with the physical and social environment, as suggested by Kniffen. Building necessitates knowledge of occupancy requirements, building materials and techniques, and environmental factors. As a result, areal distributions of building attributes (Kniffen and Glassie 1966) evidence systematic interactions between environmental and cultural factors. As Kniffen (1965) noted, geographers from Jean Brunhes (1920) to John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1952) have described housing as a basic fact of human geography.George Woolston presented a related narrative from a design perspective when he suggested that traditional buildings represent a "sort of gene pool of k DR. PETERS recently completed his doctorate in forestry in the environmental conservation department at
