A Singular Find, A Global Story: an Artifact Biography of a French Tobacco Pipestem Found at an American Civil War Encampment in Williamsburg, VA.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

During excavations of the Powhatan Park site (44WB0138) on the outskirts of Williamsburg, Virginia in 2020 archaeologists working for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation recovered an unusual artifact. The mid-19th century clay tobacco pipe stem with a maker’s mark indicating that it was manufactured in the L. Fiolet factory in St. Omer, France was the first definitively French-manufactured tobacco pipe found in Williamsburg’s cataloged artifact collection. In this presentation, I take a micro-historical approach to this artifact, first examining in detail the context of its disposal and entrance into the archaeological record before spinning out to increasingly wider scope in order to explore the themes of global exchange and consumption patterns in the late 19th century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2022 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology