Organized in 1967, the Society carries out its mission by identifying, documenting, analyzing and interpreting significant cultural landscapes, architecture and artifacts and by encouraging educational programs, scholarly research and preservation.

Pioneer America Society:
Association for the Preservation of Artifacts and Landscapes

Mission Statement
(revised April 2007)

The Pioneer America Society: Association for the Preservation of Artifacts and Landscapes (PAS:APAL) is a professional and scholarly organization formed to promote dialogue and discourse among its diverse membership. It exists to promote and support the serious study of material culture, in all its forms, and efforts of documentation and preservation of these relics extant in the Americas. The Society is a international, non-profit, educational association supported entirely by membership dues and contributions. Its membership is drawn from various academic disciplines (geography, history, anthropology, folklore), applied professions (architects, lawyers, preservationists, educators), along with informed and interested parties that enjoy the pursuit of documentation and scholarly research.

The mission of PAS:APAL is an urgent one and has become more so in recent years. With each passing day, the objects that we identify as material culture, which is virtually everything created by human conduct and defines us as a culture, are disappearing at an alarming rate. Members of the Society gather annually at an organized conference to present to others their research into the fundamental objects, rituals and ideals that have shaped the landscapes of the Americas. Sharing their research with a larger audience allows understanding and appreciation of such phenomena which can then be supported by the membership body. The knowledge of the past gives us insight into where we are today, and can provide some direction for future endeavors.

Publication of the Society's peer-reviewed, scholarly journal Material Culture and conference proceedings in Pioneer America Society Transactions documents and disseminates this research and findings to an international audience. This, in turn, allows others to fully appreciate that which they see on a daily basis. Thus, the mission of the Society is carried out for future research and appreciation of the things we may consider today to be mundane. As they become oddities in the future, there will be a body of literature to give the proper context of such subjects from a contemporary viewpoint. As members, we hold this mission in high regard, and focus our expertise and energy to make sure that which defines us now is interpreted in the proper vein by successive layers of interested researchers.

From Echoes of History, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1970 (an early PAS publication)

“The Pioneer America Society was organized to promote concern for the loss of visible symbols of our pioneer heritage anywhere in the nation, and to provide a communications media for those who share this interest.”

“The world changes before our eyes. The means and methods of one generation are not those of a later generation. The world must move on and we would not want to make it stand still even if we could. But the ingenuity of Americans in the past three hundred years, in situations that required ingenuity and resourcefulness, is something that should not be lost sight of. There is danger, however, of it being lost sight of, and that is why the Pioneer America Society is doing everything it can do to record and document the evidences of this ingenuity and resourcefulness, and to assist in making it possible for the youngsters of the present and the future to appreciate the best of our past and to carry those pioneer qualities of self-reliance and responsibility with them into the future.”

“The bulldozer mentality would wipe the evidences of our past from the face of the earth that they might be replaced at a profit. Every community will be enhanced and enriched by a balanced blend of the old, the not so old, and the new.”