Pipe Stem Dating at Strawbery Banke

Hello everyone, my name is Cassandra Trevino and I am an archaeology student currently working on my Master's degree in Applied Archaeology. For the past two weeks I have had the pleasure of volunteering at Strawbery Banke Museum. I live in Southern California, so traveling to New Hampshire for this field school has been a wonderful experience. I personally do not have much experience with historical archaeology and lab work, so having this opportunity to work at Strawbery Banke with its rich history was amazing. Most of my experience doing archaeology on the West coast is primarily prehistoric archaeology or pre-contact, so I was extremely excited to get some experience in archaeology at a historic New England seacoast site like Strawbery Banke.

Photo by David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

This two week session was strictly lab work during which we were able to assist in washing, sorting and cataloging artifacts from the most recent dig at the Penhallow site within Strawbery Banke. For the second part of the lab session we each picked an artifact class to focus on and research from the Yeaton-Walsh house site. The Yeaton-Walsh site was excavated in 2007 and 2015, and the house is scheduled to be rehabilitated and become an open exhibit at the Strawbery Banke Museum.

I choose to study the clay pipes that were recovered during the excavation. In the collection are fragments of pipe stems and bowls.

Illustration of the parts of a tobacco pipe (Noël Hume 1969:297)

The artifacts were already washed and cataloged, but I went through the collection to create a full list of the clay pipe pieces with the dates of the pipe stems and other dateable features such as maker's marks. In the 2015 excavations, the crew recovered and cataloged 349 pipe fragments. This assemblage included 229 pipe stems and 120 bowl fragments. J.C. Harrington created a dating technique for the recovered pipe stems. Based off of  his calculations the pipe stems holes are measured in 64ths of an inch. Throughout time the pipe stem bore diameters  decrease in size. Using drill bits and a block of wood I could easily measure the pipe stem diameters with the following date ranges:

9/64" - 1590 to 1620

8/64" - 1620 to 1650

7/64" - 1650 to 1680

6/64" - 1680 to 1720

5/64" - 1720 to 1750

4/64" - 1750 to 1800

Bar graph showing distribution of pipe stem bore diameters by count

Pie chart showing distribution of pipe stem bore diameters by percentage

Other scientists including Binford, Heighton and Deagan, and Hanson have created equations with standard deviations to create mean dates for the sites that have recovered pipe stems. The data from the Yeaton-Walsh pipe stem collection indicates that the majority of the pipe stems were discarded during the mid- to late eighteenth century, during which time the property was in use as Marden's Mast Yard.

Another way to date pipes is by looking at the stems and bowls for maker's marks. Pipe makers generally will stamp the pipe with their mark so they can get recognized for their work. They can take the form of initials or their full name. Sometimes, along with the maker's mark with the pipe maker's name, there is a mark that will also give the location of where the pipe was made.

Most of the pipes that have been recovered at the Yeaton-Walsh site were imported from Dutch and Scottish pipe makers. The decoration found on the both the pipe stems and the bowls are also a good indication of the time period and the location for the pipe. For example, most of these pipe stems have decoration that were common among Dutch pipe makers. Some of the pipe stems were also glazed so the porous clay stem would not stick to the person's lips while smoking. Below you can see some examples of pipe stems, decorated bowls, and a mended pipe that is almost complete that were found at the Yeaton-Walsh site. Enjoy!