Abstract
Among the ancestral Wendat peoples of southern Ontario, clay smoking pipes were one of the most common items of durable material culture. The well-documented role of pipes and pipe smoking in Native American ceremonies of healing and diplomacy can best be understood against this backdrop of more mundane, but pervasive, smoking practices. Since 2012, the Wendat Pipes Project (WPP) has involved a wide-ranging analysis of a collection of Iroquoian smoking pipes from the fifteenth-century Keffer site in south-central Ontario. The project seeks to understand all stages in the life history of fired clay smoking pipes at the site, from production through use, exchange, recycling, breakage, and discard. Results indicate that pipe smoking at Keffer was a multidimensional practice that could be improvised to suit a wide array of social contexts by different actors. Smoking pipes, I suggest, became crucial media for personal identity construction through the interweaving of personal experiences, embodied habits, and pipe life histories. The intimate entanglement of pipes and personhood arguably lay behind their involvement in rituals of social exchange.
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Notes
- 1.
These chemical groups were initially identified by visual inspection of bivariate data splitting plots. The ellipses shown in Fig. 3.4 represent these inferential groups. The association between artifact type (pottery vs. pipes) and chemistry was further examined statistically using Discriminant Function Analysis.
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Elizabeth A. Bollwerk for the invitation to participate in the conference session from which this chapter was developed and for her helpful editorial guidance. I am also particularly indebted to WPP collaborators at the University of Toronto: Gregory Braun for his work identifying fabric groups, consulting on LA-ICP-MS, collecting clay samples, and his wealth of insight related to Iroquoian pipe manufacture; Susan Dermarkar for assisting with sampling Keffer pottery vessels and sponsoring their analysis, and David G. Smith for facilitating access to the Keffer collections, providing the digitized settlement plan, and consulting on innumerable aspects of the project. Chris Creese kindly assisted with attribute recording and analysis. Funding was provided by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship and a McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Fieldwork Grant. LA-ICP-MS analysis was conducted under the supervision of Laure Dussubieux of the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum, Chicago. A number of other colleagues have contributed to the intellectual development of the project, including Elizabeth DeMarrais, John Robb, Alice Samson, and Katherine Spielmann. Any errors or oversights are solely my responsibility.
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Creese, J.L. (2016). Making Pipes and Social Persons at the Keffer Site: A Life History Approach. In: Bollwerk, E.A., Tushingham, S. (eds) Perspectives on the Archaeology of Pipes, Tobacco and other Smoke Plants in the Ancient Americas. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23552-3_3
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