Dec. 2, 2024: Artifact Breaks - Pipe Bowl

By Beth Bollwerk and Fraser Neiman

December 2, 2024

The DAACS team is in the final stages of cataloging over 50,000 artifacts and accompanying fields records from three urban house lots in historic St. Augustine – Fatio, de la Cruz, and de Leon -- as part of the Digitizing St. Augustine Project, a collaboration with colleagues at the Florida Museum of Natural History, funded by NEH. In their most recent work, they discovered a remarkable artifact: a pipe bowl carved from the rim of a large coarse earthenware vessel imported from the Iberian Peninsula.

The St Augustine sites were occupied from the early 1600s into the 20th century, and contain layers of critical information about Spanish, English, enslaved African, and Indigenous life in the old city. During our work we’ve come across several interesting artifacts but one of the most unusual is a ceramic tobacco pipe bowl from a fill deposit at Fatio. The original excavators dated the deposit to the American Territorial Period, which ran from 1821 to 1845 when St. Augustine was a territory of the United States before Florida became a state in 1845.

The pipe bowl is remarkable because it was carved from the thick of a utilitarian ceramic vessel imported from the Iberian Peninsula, probably a milk pan or large shallow basin. A bit of the distinctive green glaze that characterizes these vessels still adheres to the sherd. After the vessel broke and was discarded, someone carved two holes into the rim fragment. The larger hole served as the pipe bowl while the smaller hole served as a socket for a hollow wooden or reed stem. 

Understanding the significance of this artifact and the questions that it raises depends on knowing a bit about cultural variation in smoking technology before and after European colonization. In pre-contact North America, pipe smoking was the predominant form of tobacco use, particularly in the Eastern Woodlands. Native groups evolved pipe-making traditions using stone, clay, and wood. In contrast, in parts of South America and the Caribbean, tobacco was primarily consumed in what we would now call cigars - rolled tobacco leaves.

English colonizers encountered tobacco use in North America in what is today North Carolina. When elites adopted the practice in late 16th century England, they smoked pipes. Clay pipe smoking predominated in British colonies. Spanish colonizers encountered tobacco in the Caribbean and took up cigar smoking which in turn proliferated in Spanish colonies.