Still Life with Tobacco: The Archaeological Uses of Dutch Art

Abstract

Historical archaeologists often make considerable use of 17th-century Dutch still life and genre art to document and interpret material life in the early colonial period. In colonial Chesapeake archaeology, this art has been used to identify artifacts, to reconstruct the material and social contexts in which artifacts were used, and to imagine what the past was like in early Maryland and Virginia. This paper argues for a more critical approach to the use of Dutch art in the interpretation of colonial life by comparing the representations of women smoking tobacco in Dutch art with archaeological evidence of women’s tobacco consumption at early domestic Chesapeake sites. Although smoking by women is rarely depicted in Dutch art, archaeological data indicate that Chesapeake women regularly consumed tobacco. Museum representations of early colonial women, which also draw heavily on Dutch art in their depictions of the colonial past, rarely show tobacco smoking. These representations and the archaeological evidence raise important questions about the relationship between artistic and archaeological context and about social attitudes concerning tobacco use in the 17th and the 21st centuries.