Put That in Your Pipe and Smoke it!

Cigarette butts on the ground were so common that no one even noticed.  While the idea of rolling tobacco in a leaf or husk goes back thousands of years, people began making cigarettes rolled in paper around the time of the Civil War. 

So what did people smoke before?  Pipes.  Not necessarily the briar or corn cob version some people use today, but pipes with long stems made out of a fine white clay called kaolin.  Since they were fragile, they frequently broke.  Archaeologists love pipe fragments— pieces litter colonial archaeological sites like cigarette butts in more recent history.

Maybe you’ve found a tubular piece of pipe stem—walking on the beach or digging in your garden.  Pipe stems can actually tell us a lot about the people who used them, because archaeologists can date a site by analyzing the stem fragments.

Native Peoples in America have grown tobacco for thousands of years, for use in both ritual and recreation.  Tobacco was first popularized in England by Sir Walter Raleigh around 1600.  At that time, tobacco was imported from Spanish colonies.  Jamestown colonists tried selling Virginia tobacco to Englishmen, but they didn’t like the taste.  Colonist John Rolfe (who later married Pocahontas) brought seeds from Caribbean tobacco to Virginia—the English liked the taste better, and Virginia colonists began to export this new tobacco in 1612.

Back in England, craftsmen worked out how to make pipes based on Native American shapes, only using molded clay.  Early pipes had tiny bulbous bowls, as tobacco was expensive.  Over the years the bowl grew bigger and the stems grew longer—clay pipes smoke hot, so a longer stem is desirable.  

Archaeologists were able to put together a datable series of pipe bowls.  But what if you found only stems, and no bowls?  Archaeologists pondered this question for years, drawing and measuring the stems from every angle.  Finally, in the 1950s, archaeologist J.C. Harrington, who spent years digging at Jamestown, noticed that the hole bored into the stem got narrower over time.  A stem with a large bore was older than one with a narrower bore.  But how to measure the bore?  What did he have around his house that could measure the interior of the stem?  Drill bits—they are measured in 64ths of an inch.  Over the years excavators matched rough time periods to pipe stem bores:

Pipe stems that measure             9/64” date from approximately 1590 to 1620

8/64”                                                1620-1650

7/64”                                                1650-1680

6/64”                                                1680-1720

5/64”                                                1720-1750

4/64”                                                1750-1800

You can try this yourself at home.  Take drill bits measuring 9/64”,1/8”, 7/64”, 3/32”, 5/64” and 1/16.”  Tape them in a row with masking tape, or insert them into a block of styrofoam or wood.  Label the drill bits by 64ths of an inch, and start measuring!  Now that you know how old the pipe stem is, you can think about the person in the past who smoked it so long ago.

For more information, see http://www.nps.gov/archeology/afori/howfig_mar4.htm.

Note: This do-it-yourself technique is great for things you find while beachcombing or gardening. If you find many pipe stems with other artifacts in the ground, they may be part of an important archaeological site. In that case, the author urges you to contact a trained archaeologist.