Extensions

Students can collect additional artifacts from the following areas listed below. These areas come from Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman's Introduction to Field Techniques.  Included are many cultural elements which can function as literary symbols. These elements include oral tradition and performance, material culture, family life, festivals, drama, rituals, and information about cities and towns.

Oral Tradition and Performance

1. Spoken Word: tall tales, legends, humorous stories, beliefs, superstitions, personal experience stories, proverbs, riddles, toasts and testimonies, mnemonic devices (rhymes), nursery and game rhymes speech play, ritual insults, jokes, family histories, vocabulary and grammar, dialect and idiomatic speech, sermons 
2. Song: ballads, children's songs, work songs, blues (urban and country), sea shanties, ethnic songs, play-party and games, songs
3. Dance: clogging, square dance, round dance, buck dance
4. Game, Play, and Strategy: tag games, guessing games, seeking games, competitive games (dueling, daring, racing),  game strategy (rules and techniques), acting, pretending

1. Artifacts: houses, outbuildings, barns, floor plans, roofing materials, masonry, wall and fence constructions, tools and implements
2. The Cultural Landscape: wall and fence placement, farm planning, farming techniques, rural and urban use of land and space, physical and economic boundaries of regions and neighborhoods
3. Foodways: food preparation, recipes, gardening, canning and curing processes, traditional meal preparation, religious or symbolic uses for food
4. Crafts and Trades: boat building, blacksmithing, coal mining, tool making, papercutting, pottery, sailmaking, ropemaking, weaving, straw work, animal trapping
5. Folk Art: graphic arts, furniture decoration, embroidery, beadwork, wood carving, jewelry making, yard and garden decoration
6. Folk Medicine: home remedies and cures, midwifery

1. Traditions
2. Customs
3. Religious observations
4. Rites of passage (birth, baptism, marriage, death)

1. Gesture, body movement, and use of space
2. Seasonal and calendrical events
3. Saints and nameday celebrations
4. Feast days
5. Market days

1. Transportation
2. Communication
3. General Maps