Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: White clay pipes of European manufacture regularly appear in African descendant sites in the Caribbean and North America. They are usually recovered in the form of bowl or stem fragments.2 Many such fragments were found at Newton plantation cemetery in Barbados in the early 1970s (as well as at 13 other Barbados plantations where research was conducted). The cemetery also yielded 21 whole pipes, defined as a significant portion of the bowl and a section of the attached stem (Figure 1). These pipes were an important component of the cemetery’s grave goods and constitute what is still today the largest collection of whole pipes thus far reported in the archaeological literature for African descendant sites in North America and the Caribbean; it is possibly one of the largest, if not the largest, collection of whole pipes reported for any archaeological site in British America. Moreover, Newton also yielded one specimen of a very distinctive short-stemmed earthenware elbow/elbow-bend or stem/socket pipe of almost certain West African, possibly of Gold Coast (Ghana), origin (Handler and Lange 1978; Blakeman and Riordan 1978; Handler 1983; Handler 1997). It is rather remarkable that approximately 35 years after this pipe was discovered, as far as we are aware, nothing similar has yet been reported from African
Authors: Jerome S. Handler, Neil Norman
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W153781410