Smoking pipes of the North American Indian

"Smoking is a ritual central to the ceremonial and religious life of the native peoples of Canada and the United States. The pipes, in which the tobacco and other herbs were smoked, were therfore treated with great skill and ingenuity. Both through their beauty and widespread use they are the most representative artefacts of aboriginal America. This booklet discusses 100 pipes from the collections of the British Museum. They range in date from 100 BC to AD1900, from the Hopewell of Ohio to the Athabascans of the Northwest Territories. Particularly well represented are the Haida of British Columbia with fine early nineteenth-century argillite pipes; the Ojibwa and other peoples of the Great Lakes; and the Iroquois, Micmac and other peoples of the Eastern Woodlands. Most of the historical pipes date to the middle of the nineteenth century or before; these include a selection of pipe tomahawks with examples of the types used in the American War of Independence, the War of 1812, and traded by the Hudson's Bay Company."--Back cover.