Smoking Culture in the Interior of West Africa: A Comparative Review

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Clay tobacco pipes, both imported and African-produced, are commonly found on West African historic sites. The African-produced pipes, whose unique characteristics set them apart from their European counterparts, have been the subject of extensive studies in West Africa by various researchers. Such studies have focused on typological analyses as a pathway to understanding the spread of tobacco smoking practice, establishing chronologies, and providing insights into the social and economic dynamics of people in the subregion. This paper focuses on pipes from Ede-Ile, a seventeenth- through early nineteenth-century Yoruba town in present-day Nigeria. They share characteristics similar to local varieties from other West African sites, although it remains to be established whether they were locally produced. The study entails a comparative analysis of Ede-Ile pipes with those from other sites in the subregion to identify typological, contextual, functional, and production variations, contributing to an understanding of smoking culture in West Africa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow