When the early settlers came to Paradise Valley in northern Nevada in the 1860s and 1870s, they didn't have much to work with. Constructing their ranching community in the middle of a dry sagebrush plain that wasn't especially conducive to building, they could have admitted defeat or settled for a make-do form of construction. Happily, they didn't.

Instead, as Howard Wight Marshall suggests in his invigorating analysis of the material culture of a frontier community, they left a rich legacy of vernacular architecture that still functions today and that offers a crucial key to another world.

Marshall was well placed to appreciate this legacy. As the head of a multidisciplinary project mounted by the Library of Congress in the late 1970s, he was in charge of a research team devoted to documenting the folk history and daily life of the valley. As he interviewed families about the valley's history and construction and conducted a hands-on inspection and recording of surviving buildings, he increasingly realized just how much the community's architectural landscape revealed.

In fact, Marshall argues, a society's material culture is one of the most expressive clues to its character: the handsomely constructed buildings of Paradise Valley are symbolic of its distinctive aesthetic system, its folk traditions and culture, its ethnicity and shared vision.