Catlinite, Argillite, and Terracotta Pipes

Catlinite, argillite, and terracotta are three materials belonging to a much older layer of pipe history than briar. All three are stone or clay in origin; all three took shape in the hands of a particular geography and the community living there. In this respect they differ from the mass-production bowl materials of the industrial age: the standard here isn't a workshop catalogue but tradition.

Catlinite (Pipestone)

Geologically, catlinite is a metamorphosed mudstone squeezed into thin layers within the Sioux quartzite formation; in this respect it's considered a type of argillite. It's soft enough to be worked with hand tools, and its reddish color deepens as it's polished. In the literature it often appears directly under the name "pipestone." The main quarries lie around Pipestone in southwestern Minnesota. Traces of human activity in the area now within the Pipestone National Monument's boundaries stretch back more than three thousand years; the stone's use can be traced in written records back to at least the 17th century.

The person the material is named after is George Catlin, the American painter who painted the region's Native peoples and who, according to the record, visited the quarries in 1835. The stone's central importance in Plains culture is ceremonial: the bowl of the ceremonial calumet pipe, known as the peace pipe, is carved mostly from this stone. Today, the right to quarry stone within the monument grounds is reserved solely for enrolled members of Native communities, and the carving tradition continues.

Argillite and Haida Carving

Argillite is a fine-grained sedimentary rock formed from compressed clay particles. In the pipe world, the type most associated with this name is the black variety quarried in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off Canada's Pacific coast; the archipelago's official name was Queen Charlotte Islands until 2010. The stone is found only on Graham Island, near Slatechuck, close to Skidegate, and quarrying rights belong to the Haida people.

Exactly when Haida carvers turned to this stone isn't precisely known; sources give dates ranging from around 1800 to the late 1820s. Early pieces are understood to have transferred the formal language of the wooden pipe tradition onto stone, and production quickly turned into a trade item for coastal sailors and fur traders. The distinctive form of the period is the "panel pipe," in which dense figurative compositions were carved onto a rectangular slab; examples exist featuring both Haida motifs and European sailing ships. By the middle of the century, most pieces are said to have shifted from being smokeable to becoming sculptural objects instead. The material offers no ease to the carver: it resists the tool and reveals its flaws only as the work progresses; it's reported that moisture within the stone can cause it to crack in the cold.

Terracotta Chibouks

Terracotta is a clay-based ceramic fired without being brought to the point of vitrification, porous and mostly left unglazed; kiln temperature is generally around 1,000 degrees Celsius, though older examples are known to have been fired as low as 600 degrees. During firing, iron oxides in the body react with oxygen, and the piece takes on a color ranging from earthy yellow to brick red. Terracotta bowls appear across very distant geographies: pre-Columbian Mesoamerican finds, 17th-century Chesapeake settlements, chibouk bowls unearthed in Lisbon excavations, and examples from Ghana and Burkina Faso. This spread makes the material the most widely distributed relative of the clay pipe.

The most thoroughly studied member of this family in the archaeological literature is the bowl fitted to the end of the Ottoman chibouk. With a stem ranging from one to one and a half meters and a fired-clay bowl produced separately and then fitted onto the stem, the chibouk gave rise to its own craft tradition, as seen in the example of Tophane pipemaking. In archaeology, the typology of chibouk bowl shapes is used as a benchmark for dating excavation finds.