The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley is a classic study of ethnography, published in 1974 by John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf.
The authors trace the history of the region through the Middle Ages and down to the current inhabitants and their culture.
For the German Tyroleans, the social center is the Hof, the individual estate and its land, ideally passed down the generations by impartible inheritance to the eldest son.
In the earlier study, Wolf argued for the primacy of culture over environmental constraints, in this case reflecting two distinct and deeply rooted cultural heritages, in the case of the German speakers of the Germanic migration period system of autarky of each family household, in the case of the Italian speakers the Mediterranean civilization inherited from the Roman Empire, where rural communities are culturally dominated by the urban centers on the coasts.
The 1974 modified these conclusions, as it became apparent that while the division in the cultural ideals was indeed clear-cut between the villages, in reality the estates in both communities were kept at the same optimized sizes, showing that while cultural differences persisted for centuries even in close proximity, significantly affecting the political sphere, the necessities of the environmental conditions still dictated the same strategies for either community.