A Smoking Good Find at Fort St. Joseph

I am troweling the north half of my unit. 

Hey everyone, my name is Kaleb. I am a senior majoring in biomedical sciences and anthropology, and minoring in chemistry at WMU.  During the first full week of excavating at the Fort St. Joseph site here in Niles, my pit partner Melanie and I found an interesting artifact, that at first appeared to be calcined bone in the bottom of our pit. On closer inspection however, we noticed that there were letters engraved into one side of the artifact, and that the underside had a bit of a curve to it between the two lines where it broke at. After conferring with Dr. Nassaney and several staff members at the site, we found out that the artifact we had uncovered was not bone, but in fact a segment from the bowl of a clay pipe. The reason that the pipe looked like bone was that it likely broke when the area was plowed, well after those who lived at Fort St. Joseph had moved on. We were able to tell this because the area of soil we were excavating at the time was approximately seven to eight centimeters beneath the grass covered silty soil, deposited over the years from the flooding of the river. The silty soil is a number of centimeters above what we call the occupation zone of the soil; the area in which artifacts such as large sections of oxidized soil (soil where there was at one point in time high heat over a period of time), or features (larger man-made remnants such as building foundations, walls, or fireplaces) lay undisturbed.

 The pipe piece that we found had the letters T. D., with filigree (ornamental patterns resembling swirls or leaves) below the letters, all within what appears to be a circle surrounding it. We believe that the T. D. engraved on the pipe bowl is related to 1700’s clay pipe maker Thomas Dormer and is either a part of his pipe company’s makers mark or is a post 1750’s nod to Thomas Dormer’s style of pipe that became incredible popular among pipe smokers and was imitated by later pipe companies such as the D. McDougall Co. out of Glasgow Scotland in the early 1900’s (Sudbury, 2006).

The T.D. pipe bowl fragment.

 While the marker of an artifact is incredibly important in understanding the way that it came to be lost, discarded, or left behind by an individual; the use of an artifact is also incredibly important. In todays “modern society” we use items such as gas gauges or mile markers to determine how much distance we can traverse before either having to stop to refuel or to reach a destination. In the early 1700’s the French fur traders at Fort St. Joseph did not have pre-calculated and posted delineations of distance like we do with mile markers, so they used what tools they had at the time. The voyageurs would measure distance by the length of time between packing their pipes and having to repack their pipes. These distances became known as 'pipes' which were then used similar to having a half of a tank of gas and knowing that you could go 200 miles off of that tank. 

Technology of today’s world has changed the items in which we measure how far and how long a journey is. However, the concept behind the modern gas gauge and tobacco pipes is the same, linking us to the past in ways we never really considered before.

References

Sudbury, J. B. (2006). Historic Clay Tobacco Pipe Studies. Phytolith Press.