Ottoman Clay Tobacco Pipes

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Clay pipes constitute an attractive class of artifacts given their prominence in the relatively recent archaeological record, their decorative richness, their usefulness in dating, their testament to tobacco production and type of consumption, and the manner in which they reflect the socioeconomic status of their users. Until recently, most archaeologists who have conducted excavations at historical sites of the Late Islamic period have either partly or entirely neglected the significance of Ottoman pipes in their publications. It is not surprising, therefore, that detailed studies on Ottoman clay tobacco pipes are quite rare. Nevertheless, studies of clay pipes in general can be traced to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when many journals and archives concerned with such artifacts were established in Europe and America, including the following: The Archaeology of Clay Tobacco Pipes, Society for Clay Pipe Research Newsletter, Historic Clay Tobacco Pipe Studies, and National Clay Tobacco Archive, in addition to seminal publications on clay pipe studies such as A. Oswald’s Clay Pipes for the Archaeologist (1975); R. Robinson’s Tobacco Pipes of Corinth and the Athenian Agora (1985), and U. Baram’s Material Culture, Commodities and Consumption in Palestine, 1500-1900 (1996). The Ottoman clay tobacco pipes discussed in this paper were collected over a six-year period from Saffa, a village located in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 16 km west of Ramallah and nearly 22 km northwest of Jerusalem. Saffa was inhabited throughout the Roman, Byzantine, Early and Late Islamic periods. In 2006, the estimated population of the village of Saffa was 3300 persons. Here, the cultivation of tobacco plants in the village both for local consumption and for trade lasted at least from late Ottoman era to the 1970s.