Date of Graduation

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

Committee Chair

Barbara Rasmussen

Abstract

he most recent trend in historic preservation has led many in the field to pay attention to cultural landscapes as historic resources. Considering buildings, structures, or objects within a given spatial and physical setting, or landscape, endows them with historic significance and context that would be absent if viewed individually. While this is somewhat of an expansive approach to the built environment, this trend in historic landscape interpretation still does not account for all types of resources that one finds in the field. A fragmentary landscape is a cultural landscape defined by three characteristics: 1) the presence of buildings, structures, or objects surviving from different historic periods, often with significant alterations; 2) the existence of ruins or gaps in the landscape where historic buildings or structures formerly stood; and 3) the landscape’s changes through time reflected and revealed through the built environment and its surrounding natural features.1

The community of Edna in Monongalia County, WV, comprising one hundred and twenty five acres of abandoned and “reclaimed” mine lands, is an example of such a landscape and serves as a case study for this thesis. This study focuses on the use of a historical predictive model built using a cultural landscape approach within a Geographic Information System (GIS) framework. Within the GIS model, this fusion is accomplished by reinserting historic cultural landscapes into spatial analysis through an interpretation of site information as cultural space. An interdisciplinary methodology is offered that explores the use of concepts in historical and cultural landscape in concurrence with both quantitative sources (census data, city directories, GIS spatial data, and exploratory techniques for predictive modeling) and qualitative sources (archives, photographs, and oral histories).

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