What do we call the tools we use? We call that culture. When we think of cultures of the past or of other places, the image we see in our minds is an assembly of tools. Language is a tool- for communication. So is humor, music, storytelling, the general approach to life. Clothing is a tool- to survive the seasons. Traditional food is a tool, certain recipes that make sense given what can grow, the tools we have to cultivate it, the ways we have to preserve it, and how the cooking and eating of it fits into the schedule and behavior of our lives.

Diet is one side of another complex of tools we call agriculture, to grow food we need to work with our natural world, to know the limits of what we can do. We also need implements, and often external power from through the use of machines or animals, the fuel for this power is a technology that is a part of our culture as well, as is the means by which we construct our implements. All of the choices of tools and techniques we make become what we call our culture. If we make them again and again, they become customary, and this results in a tradition. 

The nature of culture is living, it is dynamic and constantly changing, just as are the humans it accompanies. The other peoples, materials, environments and ideas we encounter all change how we understand the world and impact the tools we choose to use. 

Once our tools were dictated largely by our natural world. We moved slowly and little, the predominant resource we had was time and the things we understood about nature. We used the natural materials we had locally to make our structures and tools, we relied on individuals and community to build our social technology, a strong system of traditions and customs that educated people in the skills they needed to make their tools and draw sustenance from the landscape. Our techniques were within our grasp- almost any person could copy almost any tool they encountered, and modify it to their desires. Everything we made was part of a creative, personal and generative process, which lent itself to different regions and behaviors exhibiting wildly different micro-adapted behaviors, tools and solutions. Each region had different breeds of livestock, shapes of tools, types of clothing, design of houses, types of recipes, forms of farmstead, ways of speaking, music, dances, ways of working, etc. all crafted from the same natural materials. This was a world where people had some confidence in the slow sophisticated evolution of the technology embodied in their regional tradition, surely if each generation makes small improvements, excellent results will continue to be obtained, was their reasoning. 

This is the type of culture many think of when they think about the culture of our region, northern new New England, to over simplify, they think of rolling hills patchworked with stone walls to enclose pastures and hayfields, timber hay barns, houses and bridges, maple sugaring, and cutting firewood in the winter time. This culture came with its own diet, tools, structures, and systems of energy. This culture was a sophisticated set of technologies in action. One built on the basic model of similar systems that had been customary in Europe for many centuries, strengthened with new varieties of crops and foods and natural resources that had their origin in America. 

Many still admire these kinds of behaviors and techniques but in today's world we are not so free to choose our cultural techniques. Industrial tools put a break in the continuity of cultural development, now we have the same tools employed everywhere, and thus, regional and human scale cultures are disappearing at an alarming rate. We still cling to the nostalgia of culture, we eat traditional foods and preserve to some extent the landscape artifacts of the past, pastures and barns, but this is akin to keeping a classic old car in the yard for the look, we’ve lost the keys and don’t know where to get the gas for it anymore. 

We can’t make a wagon and it is daunting to make the shift to using animals and solar power in the form of hay if we wanted to, many feel they have no choice but to adhere to the dominant culture of consuming industrial products rather than making tools and getting resources from the landscape. The essence of the technology that produced the old culture was embodied in custom, tradition, and cultural continuity. Its dna was in people, and their learning from one another, and thus cannot be easily reconstituted where lost, whereas the dna of industrial products is in blueprints and factory plans and you can buy any of its extremely complex technologies very easily, you need very little in terms of specialized skills or knowledge. This change seems to have rung the death knell of traditional technologies the world over. 

However this is not the case, there is a strong counter current of people who value a choice in the technologies they employ, they find in the older mode more meaningful diverse sets of value, in terms of ecological impact, and the impacts on communities and the health and wellness of the individual. 

Our aim here is to preserve and re-discover the cultural technologies that have been kept intact here at Maplegrove Farm, and to examine other cross-cultural options with the aim of keeping the human scale technologies of the past alive and viable, as real options for the future. 

We do this by pursuing preservation through active cultural practice. When a preservationist, for instance, preserves an old barn, they must understand that it is a technology- not merely a building. It is more akin to a battery for storing solar energy in the form of hay to do all kinds of physical work. How are they to preserve the technology if they only preserve the shell of the building? How is our literary, in all the cultural practices that made it function, to survive? The understanding of efficient hay cutting, moving and storage, and the storage of fodder crops, of oat threshing, tack and harness making, storage and repair, horse and livestock husbandry, the making and storage of scoots and wagons of all kinds, etc? 

To preserve barns without their contents as a national state policy is like the librarians of the future preserving computer towers as evidence of the wonders of computing while discarding all the software inside. The researchers of the future will only nod in agreement and say “they sure didn’t do much, no wonder we stopped using them.”

We can’t form an opinion of the viability, efficiency, economics, or complex forms of value that other cultural technologies may have had if instances of them are not allowed to thrive somewhere. Hopefully our research and efforts here can move in the direction of creating such a place.