Seeking Kaweah

This chapter focuses on a single intentional community, the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth, that attempted to establish a socialist alternative to corporate monopoly and labor exploitation in late nineteenth-century Tulare County, California. Employing the scaled archaeological view presented in the preceding chapters illuminates different aspects of the group's attempts to built a better society. The Kaweah Colony's major landscape modification effort, a road to access timber resources, became a backbone of their settlement pattern in the mountainous terrain. Their tent village of Advance was built to provide families with basic services such as a communal kitchen and dining hall, school, and printing office within canvas shelters. Each family brought their own household possessions to Advance, furnishing tents with comforts, conveniences, and cultural symbols that mixed Victorian domesticity with radical social goals. While archaeological remains of Kaweah Colony households' daily lives are scant, their road and its associated camp locations provide tangible reminders in local memory of a time when hopeful social innovators considered this remote valley to be the "Center of Civilization."

Material Visions

Artifacts made, bought, and used within past intentional communities demand careful interpretation. They may reaffirm or challenge our long-held ideas about a group, and as mute witnesses to the past can invite conflicting views among scholars and community descendants. This chapter spans the volume's widest temporal range, from eighteenth-century ceramics and food remains left by Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister to twentieth-century vinyl records listened to by members of California's Chosen Family. Examples from the Shakers, Harmonists, and Moravians demonstrate the importance of building community-specific contexts of interpretation that are sensitive to differences between individual groups as well as temporal changes within long-lived communities.

Maps of Idealism

At the scale of cultural landscapes, community visions were expressed broadly as the distribution of villages across space and creation of extensive residential, agricultural, and industrial systems. In this chapter, landscapes are considered as active participants in community formation and growth. Shaker spaces were designed to reflect and reinforce an ordered vision, and maintaining order was a dynamic process within which brothers and sisters continuously reworked their village landscapes. The Harmonist's gardens communicated the relationship between members and the community's leader, and connected the American movement to its German theological roots. Idealized urban plans met with the realities of local geography and resource availability as they were made real on the ground in Mormon towns and at the Llano del Rio colony.

Understanding Communities

This chapter outlines patterns in the history of scholarship on intentional communities, beginning with journalists and social observers contemporary with the groups as well as voices from within communities themselves. The interplay between seemingly dispassionate evaluations, critical excoriations, and glowing endorsements from a multitude of scholars over the past several decades has created not a unified field of study but a multidisciplinary niche accommodating historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and others. Archaeology's strengths in accessing evidence at three scales; landscape, the built environment, and artifacts, are presented and demonstrated in the case study of the ca. 1899–1920 Doukhobor village of Kirilovka in western Canada.

Building the Ideal

This chapter introduces the terminology of studying alternative communities and interrogates the terms utopian, communal, and intentional as applicable to the subject of the book. Finding "intentional communities" to be the preferred term, the chapter provides five qualities that are shared by all groups who may be defined as such. An overview of the types of communities prevalent in American history follows, including religious movements such as the Shakers and Harmonists, social reform movements such as the Oneida Community and Brook Farm, and socialist experiments such as the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth and Llano del Rio Cooperative. The chapter explains why company towns, residential institutions, and temporary communities are not intentional communities and provides justification for the geographic limitations of the volume.

At Home, Work, and Worship

The domestic, devotional, and work spaces inhabited by past intentional community members hold traces of their family structures and can provide evidence of the dynamic nature of community building. Repairs to the Ephrata Colony's Kedar and a remnant abandoned arch in a Shaker basement are two examples of buildings as processes of negotiation and inhabitation that were physically changed as their builders' needs, abilities, and expectations changed. And as they were inhabited, buildings worked upon their residents to reinforce behaviors central to community belief, from the separating brothers' and sisters' staircases of Shaker family houses to the gathering rooms of the Oneida Mansion House. In providing examples from archaeological and architectural history approaches to intentional communities' built environments, this chapter demonstrates the strength of this scale in accessing family structures and identifying built responses to members' long- and short-term visions and goals.

Remaking Communities

Reconstructions and restorations at intentional community sites, such as Shaker and Moravian villages, are popular tourist destinations and valuable resources for public education. How do these sites present past groups' ideals within a modern societal context that largely contradicts many of their fundamental principles? How can visitors seek inspiration from intentional communities' unique efforts to enact or embody societal change when modern reconstructions often focus on quaint agrarian lifestyles that celebrate nostalgia for a shared, uncontested past, or highlight small innovations and inventions that align with our American ideals of individualism and entrepreneurial spirit? This chapter seeks to open a broad conversation among archaeologists about our role in interpreting and presenting community pasts as acts of social critique. Moving forward, we must acknowledge the modern social and political assumptions and motivations behind our interpretations of past communities, whether they are picturesque visions of an imagined simpler time, critical reflections on the discriminatory beliefs entwined with many group's histories, or calls to rekindle a movement or spirit from which we can learn today.

Introduction

The introduction contextualizes long history of North American intentional communities within what we assume to be fundamentally American visions and values. It introduces how social, economic, and literary movements inspired groups to seek alternatives to the mainstream's perceived flaws and injustices. The chapter introduces archaeology's disciplinary contributions to better understanding past communities and describes the multiscalar method of organizing archaeological views presented in subsequent chapters.