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The two examples at the top are from the collections of the University of Georgia. The pipe at the bottom is unusual in that it is not made of steatite, but is sandstone. It is of the same type, but includes an incised ring around the top of the bowl. The pipe was recovered from a plowed field as a young boy followed his dad’s tractor. That boy was a beloved brother who later gave his life in Viet Nam.
Tobacco may have been used for smoking as long as 5000 years ago and the square cut steatite pipe is generally believed to belong to the Late Archaic and Early Woodland periods. It may have been one of the earliest pipe forms in the Southeast, but the discovery of an Archaic burial in Limestone County, Alabama with a Tubular pipe under its arm may suggest otherwise. The research of L.O. Wyman and the four year search of C.B. Moore along the shell middens of the St. Johns river may paint a different picture.Wyman had recovered no pipes during his research and Moore had recovered just five pipes, four broken and one whole tube pipe.Those examples came from the Mulberry Midden, a much younger midden than the older Orange period and Early Woodland St. Johns middens.Moore concluded that the use of tobacco was unknown to the builders of the earlier middens while the builders of the later Mulberry Midden used tobacco with a tube form of pipe. Bennie Keel recovered one whole example of the square steatite pipe and three fragments from the Tuckasegee site in western North Carolina.The site was historic Cherokee and Keel believed the steatite pipe to have come from a prior, Late Archaic or Early Woodland occupation.John A. Walthall supports this idea, pointing out that pipe smoking did not become part of the Native American ritual until the Woodland period.
While its use in these early periods is questionable at best, the form has been consistently recovered from Middle Woodland sites dating between 200 B.C. and 600 A.D. throughout the Southeast. C.B. Moore recovered one example at the Shield’s Mound in Duval Co. Florida. The mound also contained the early form of Swift Creek pottery. He also recovered an example from a mound near Crystal River with Crystal River, Weeden Island I and Franklin Plain pottery dating to Florida’s Weeden Island I period. Moore also recovered a sandstone pipe of similar form from Grant Mound in Duval County, Florida. The pipe bowl was at less than a 90 degree angle with the stem. Grant Mound contained St. Johns Check Stamped and Little Manatee Zoned Stamped pottery, indicating a Middle Woodland context. Moore recovered a rounded version of this pipe, again with less than a 90 degree angle with the stem that was made of coquina from the Mandarin Point mound in Jacksonville that had the same Middle Woodland context as the Grant Mound. Another example of the rounded variety of steatite pipe was recovered from a Middle Woodland Copena site near the Guntersville Basin in northeastern Alabama. Three pipes were recovered from this site, one of steatite, one of sandstone, and one ceramic pipe that was tempered with limestone. Finally, Lewis and Kneberg recovered two pipe blanks that were square-cut, but were made of claystone. These were shaped at a 90 degree angle between bowl and stem, but were clearly part of the process of pipe making and not the finished product. They seemed to be part of the Late Mississippian Dallas culture and not of the much earlier square cut steatite variety.
