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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