In this highly anticipated book, Dennis Blanton presents his analysis of smoking pipes from Mississippian sites in the greater southern Appalachians, contributing to archaeological knowledge about the complexity of precolumbian smoking traditions in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. For the book, Blanton's study area encompasses eastern Alabama, eastern Tennessee, northern Florida, all of Georgia, and parts of the Carolinas. The era of interest spans AD 1000–1600. Blanton's comprehensive treatment of pipes from a large region and over several hundred years is one of the first regional studies of smoking pipes and practices in the Mississippian world, and it represents a major contribution to the area's literature.
In Chapter 1, Blanton provides the reader with a well-researched account of the importance of tobacco to prehistoric Native Americans and the special relationships they had with tobacco and tobacco smoke. Given the symbolic and ceremonial status of tobacco across Native North America, archaeologists have long recognized the importance of smoking pipes themselves as well as the tobacco and other plants smoked in them and smoking rituals. However, despite the long history and widespread practice of tobacco smoking in Native North America, the dearth of information in the archaeological literature and the lack of synthetic treatment and interpretations of Mississippian smoking pipes drives Blanton's work here.
In Chapter 2, Blanton summarizes the archaeological evidence that identifies the South Appalachian Mississippian cultural tradition and region as an identifiable culture area. He also demonstrates that most of our knowledge about the prehistoric smoking culture and more specifically tobacco is insufficient and not grounded in comparative considerations of smoking pipes or paleoethnobotanical evidence. Pipes recovered from archaeological sites are too often identified as tobacco pipes without direct evidence of tobacco use at the site. Pipes found archaeologically may have been made for smoking other plants instead of or in addition to tobacco. This important point is often overlooked and has resulted in incomplete understandings of pipe smoking rituals and the plants involved.
After thoroughly describing artifact assemblages and the related archaeological evidence, Blanton turns his attention in Chapter 3 to theoretical discussions of religious rituals and the use of pipes in those rituals. Applying cultural evolutionary theory and costly signaling theory, Blanton explains how spatial and temporal variability in pipe forms reflect local and regional practices and changes and how those circulated more widely throughout the Mississippian world of the Southeast and Midwest. By applying these theoretical perspectives, Blanton simultaneously considers the physical changes in pipe forms and how those changes correspond to the functions the pipes served in religious rituals.
In Chapter 4, Blanton describes pipe attributes (size, stem form, rim form, and raw material) and discusses how these attributes changed during the Mississippian period. There were few pipes and pipe forms during the Early Mississippian period (AD 1000–1200), an explosion in the numbers of pipe styles and elaboration of stylistic characteristics during the Middle Mississippian period (AD 1200–1375), and a diversification of stylistic elements adopted during the Late Mississippian period (AD 1375–1600). The established temporal patterns were determined using both cluster analysis and multiple correspondence analysis. Combining his attribute analysis with the recovery contexts of the pipes and their geographical distribution, Blanton convincingly shows associations between specific elements and particular periods and provinces within the larger study area.
In Chapter 5, following his analysis of smoking pipes, Blanton returns to a discussion of Mississippian pipe symbolism and costly signaling associated with religious rituals and production of ritual equipment. In so doing, he situates pipes and pipe smoking within broader Mississippian cultural practices. Blanton concludes in Chapter 6 with a discussion of the significance of studying pipes and the evolution of smoking rituals as an important facet of the broader Mississippian culture. He argues that the lack of archaeological analyses of pipes—an oft-overlooked and underappreciated artifact class—has hindered our understanding of South Appalachian Mississippian religion and ritual. While Blanton characterizes his treatment of pipes as “incomplete and limited” (p. 144), he provides a valuable model for other researchers to follow in further study of Mississippian pipes and pipe-related rituals.
Blanton's fine-grained analysis of pipes provides a powerful and compelling argument for archaeological research on smoking as a window to broader cultural characteristics and patterns of culture change in the past. Theoretically, Blanton uses cultural evolutionary theory to explore stylistic variability in pipe attributes over time and then applies costly signaling theory to explain how those changes in pipe form relate to broader regional and temporal patterns. Methodologically, his use of both cluster analysis and multiple correspondence analysis provides convincing evidence for stylistic changes in pipe attributes during the Mississippian period in the Southern Appalachian region. Overall, this book contributes substantially to the archaeological literature, and it is essential reading for anyone studying smoking rituals and traditions in Native North America.
