Smoking Pipes and Quotidian Constellations in Brazil

When Europeans arrived in the American continent, smoking, sniffing, chewing, and fumigation of different plants were integral to the practices of several native peoples, as documented by many Jesuits and explorers. There has been many precolonial clay pipes found in the territory of today’s Brazil, attesting its long term, wide distributed, and diverse use. In archaeological sites of historical periods, there are both foreign and Brazilian-made clay smoking pipes. While foreign pipes are found mainly in coastal Brazil, its local counterpart is found virtually ubiquitously, in historical sites throughout the country’s territory. Made by either molding or hand shaping, they are also incredibly diverse, particularly regarding their decorations. Considering the need for a synthesis and the scarce international bibliography on these Brazilian items, this chapter provides a brief overview of such diversity. A specific emphasis with be given to some types of historic Brazilian-made smoking pipes, in view of their manufacture characteristics, decorative and symbolic patterns, and geographic dispersal. While some appear individually scaled and others seem locally scattered, others express variations of similar tobacco pipes very distant from each other, widely disseminated throughout the country. Based on a nonsystematic database compiled for this discussion, this chapter sketches a dynamic scenario of multiple internal and external Brazilian connections.