Artifact Trivia Challenge

For the month of November, we’re doing a three-round artifact guessing game here on the blog! (Plus a holiday surprise, for those keeping count.) Our Curator Cat Frankie is kicking things off:

What are those long white tubes?

You may see that they look like pipes: there’s a “bowl” at one end, where tobacco might go, and then a hole at the opposite end for smoking. But why so long? Aren’t they unweildy and fragile?

They are—and that’s the point! In a very pre-Covid era, a group of people (most often men) smoking together could share one of these pipes. Before passing the pipe on to the next person, though, they’d snap off the end that they had used, leaving a clean end for the new person. Pieces of these pipes are incredibly common at colonial archaeological sites. I speak from personal experience—I did my field school training at a tavern site in Maine, and aside from nails, bits of these pipes were our most common find!