Once I visited the house that "The House of Seven Gables" by Nathaniel Hawthorne was based on, so maybe that novel could be used as valid research for the actual house. And, yes, the house did have seven gables.

If they were studying the houses knocked over due to natural disasters, most of their evidence would be unknown. They would have to find documents and research the sights where the buildings used to be. It would be interesting to study the architecture that arose after the natural disasters, and compare the architecture before and after. It's probably too soon to study that though.

If a vernacular researcher only had two of those three, would their findings be as stable?

Extrinsic: not part of the essential nature of someone or something; coming or operating from outside.

This would definitely be the case for studying early 21st century southern Louisiana architecture.

You can't do this if you're studying older architecture because the people who lived there are all dead...

Exactly the case for the architecture of certain areas after a natural disaster has struck.

How much of history is made up?

If somebody were comparing the architecture before and after a natural disaster, I think it would be very clear where the old ideas are washed away and the new ideas arose. I mean if a flood wipes away a bunch of old houses, people are probably going to seize that opportunity to build new living complexes or even industrial areas.

Exegesis: critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture.

If you stuck to the usual documents, then vernacular architecture wouldn't exist. It would just be archeology.

So most of the vernacular architecture research isn't going to be ethnographic because they mostly study old buildings where nobody lives anymore.

This is the case for all of history, but I think that architecture is probably the most effective way to find out more about a certain historical culture. People poor themselves into their living areas. I mean, not only are certain types of architecture representative of a culture as a whole, but each individual structure will have a little bit of a distinct person in it, which not only gives you insight into culture, but also into individual human nature.

What about traces of natural disasters? The study of vernacular architecture has to take in a lot of things when doing research.

You can only recover their stories through the eyes of the people who knew them. An indirect reference is that great for research though.

So material culture is a slightly more objective manner of research than an individuals recordings.

Nothing shows class better than a person's living space, so vernacular architecture can sometimes show, more accurately than written history, class differences and how people in certain classes actually lived.

How will the vernacular researchers of the future show how the people of southern Louisiana lived by there aesthetic preferences? Will there be enough buildings left to research this?

Will the vernacular researchers of the future be able to see how the natural disaster brought the people of different classes together? I think that the only thing that would be able to show that would be written history.

I think it will be interesting to see how vernacular architecture is used in the future to study the sites of natural disasters. Will they use it to explore how people came together? Or will they use it to come up with a better plan to be prepared for natural disasters? Personally, I think that they won't be using architecture to study it. I think that in the internet age, vernacular archicture is only good for researching cultures and people that we don't have access to anymore, or who weren't around for the invention of the internet.