Author Description

This volume presents a global study of the economic and cultural global systems in which smoking materials, practices and ideas circulate, intertwine, and transform. This book compiles original work authored by researchers from the Americas, Africa, and Europe to elicit a comparative archaeology of smoking and pipes through histories and case studies from localities and regions on both sides of the Atlantic. Consequently, the book is divided into four sections divided by region. The first chapters focus on Amerindian pipes and smoking, and these are followed by research on smoking and clay pipe use in post-17th century Europe. Chapters on the production and use of clay smoking pipes in Brazil and a reflection on the influence of pipes and smoking in Senegambia comprise the final two sections respectively. Taken together, this volume explores a wide range of issues, such as economic and cultural relations between old and new worlds; the effects of colonization in different parts of the globe; circulation of ideas, practices, and objects in hegemonic and non-hegemonic transatlantic connections; techniques and styles of making and decorating pipes; materialization and expression of ethnicities and of their blurred frontiers; changes and continuities observed in smoking materials and their inferred meanings. The book compiles fresh insights on the complex and diverse history of smoking and transatlantic economic and cultural interactions associated with it. It is of interest to both historical and pre-historical archaeologists researching material culture in several regions of the world, but also historians and anthropologists interested in material culture and global cultural systems.