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Smoking & Culture: Archaeology Tobacco Pipes Eastern North America

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From the eleven articles by anthropologists and archaeologists connected with universities, one finds that the Indian "peace pipe" familiar from numerous Western movies was but a small aspect of pipes in Native American culture. For example, there was also a "war pipe.". But the place of pipes in pre-Columbian and later Native American culture goes far beyond this as well. ""First, it must be kept in mind that smoking pipes are essentially drug delivery devices and that smoking instills varying degrees of altered consciousness." In "no way utilitarian," pipes are thus distinguished from other aboriginal artifacts; and from this way they are distinguished, they uniquely shed light on dimensions of spirituality, shamanistic practices, tribal social activities, inter-tribal relationships, and the history and movement of tribes. As seen by some of the latter essays, these social and anthropological matters relating to pipes found their way into different ethnic and regional groups of Europeans settling in eastern North America who adopted pipe smoking. Native American pipes were made of stone or wood; had different shapes; and sometimes included effigies of animals. All of these differences concern different purposes and occasions, or tell something about the history of the group respective pipes were related to. Rafferty is an associate professor of anthropology at SUNY-Albany; Mann is an archaeologist in Louisiana. Photographs, maps, and tables go with the text in this fetching subject.