Understanding Iroquois and Hopewell Smoking Pipes

Out of all the indigenous peoples of North America, the Hopewell culture of the Middle Woodland Period and the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee are two of the most studied by art historians when it comes to the subject of ritual tobacco pipes. This is a comparison between the smoking pipes and practices of these two groups which explores some of their differences and similarities I’ve observed and provides detailed information and full-color graphics for visual representation. 

The platform pipe is a rather unique style of pipe shape that is known to be exclusive to the Hopewell tradition of the Middle Woodland Period.

This particular type of smoking pipe consists of a flattened rectangular “platform” stem with the bowl on top typically protruding near the center of the piece. The base was often curved, albeit very slightly and always in a concave down fashion. The majority of these Hopewell platform pipes were carved from catlinite, also known as pipestone. Catlinite is a kind of reddish-colored metamorphosized clay stone found only in certain areas of the United States and Canada, though deposits of the best and most malleable pipestone are found in the quarries of Southern Minnesota. Among the multitude of other materials commonly used in Hopewell pipes were limestone, fired clay, hardstone, and sandstone. Many of these platform pipes depicting remarkably detailed effigies of various North American animals including but not limited to: beavers, frogs, otters, bears, wild cats, raccoons, foxes, and a wide array of different species of bird. In nearly all of these, the bowl was located on the animal’s back. The pipes themselves were usually quite small, only about three to five inches in length.

Anthropomorphic pipes have been found in both the Iroquois and Hopewell tradition, but were much more prevalent among the Iroquois. In fact, the most well-known human effigy pipe in Native North American history, widely believed to be of Adena origin, is asserted by some art historians and scholars to be the work of Hopewell. The pipe in question is the iconic three-dimensional Adena effigy pipe resembling a masculine figure”likely either a high-ranking tribal leader or some sort of spiritual being”wearing nothing but a loincloth and two sizeable spool-like earrings. The figure stands approximately 20 centimeters tall, and the bowl is located at the bottom of his feet with a mouthpiece and hole on top of his head for the user to inhale the smoke. It was discovered in Adena Mound in 1901 and though the exact year it was sculpted is unknown, radiocarbon dating suggests it was somewhere within the range of 100 BCE to 100 CE.

Today, this piece of history resides in the Cleveland Museum of Art and in 2013, a bill was passed to official declare it Ohio’s state artifact. The Iroquois people are another Native American culture known for sculpting effigy pipes in the human form. Boasting an impressive twenty-nine different styles of anthropomorphic pipes alone, this variety of effigy pipe greatly outnumbers the Iroquois’ animal-shaped counterparts. These distinctions were largely based on the kinesics of the figures depicted, such as arm and eye position, and exist as subgroups within the two major classifications of “heads only” and “heads and bodies”. The most popular and diverse group of the two was the standalone human head shape, accounting for 19 of the total 29 different variations including some depicting multiple faces or Janus-face, with the remaining ten styles in the form of the full body.The majority of Iroquois pipes were very abstract in nature, standing in contrast to the pipes of Hopewell which often strived more for realism.

In addition to their human effigy pipes, Iroquois artists also produced a myriad of zoomorphic pipes. In a similar manner to the human effigy pipes, Iroquois animal effigy pipes were not as realistic as their Hopewell counterparts. This lack of fine detail has made it more challenging for art historians and archaeologists to identify the animals the original artists were attempting capture the image of with some of these artifacts so not all of the classifications can be certain. Examples of animals noted for being difficult to differentiate between include the crows and ravens, passenger pigeons and ducks, cranes and woodpeckers, and wolves and dogs. There was a plethora of different animals represented by these pipes, but birds were by far the most abundant. This is due in part to the spiritual significance of birds in Haudenosaunee mythology. The Iroquois believed that certain birds were the incarnations of the Gan-da-yah, the spiritual entities whose primary mission was to protect crops from pestilence and famine.During their battle with the forces of nature, the Gan-dah-yah were said to return to earth in the physical form of birds to bring the people news, and the kind of omen they carried was dependent on what type of bird they were.If one was to appear in the form of a raven, it was an indication of good news, if it was an owl, this signified a warning to the Iroquois to prepare for difficult times ahead, and if the Gan-dah-yah took the form of a bat, this was an omen even darker than that of the owl, it was the admonitory of catastrophic events such as enemy invasion looming over the horizon. Haudenosaunee pipes in the form of ravens and owls have both been unearthed along with renditions of four other different species of bird, though bat effigy pipes have yet to be discovered.

Much like the majority of the Iroquois’ anthropomorphic pipes, most of their zoomorphic pipes were also just effigies of the creature’s head, outnumbering the pipes modeled after the full animal. Unlike the Hopewell animal effigy pipes which were almost entirely comprised of platform pipes, the Haudenosaunee boasted a much greater artistic diversity in the shapes motifs of theirs. Many of these pieces had the pipe stem attached to the animals in unusual ways, almost giving the illusion of oddly shaped bodies on some of the birds, while many of the reptile pipes resembled generic pipe shapes being gripped by the creatures such as salamanders hugging an oversized bowl, or a snake coiled around the body of the pipe.

It is worth noting that classification of salamanders as reptiles by The Canadian Journal of Archaeology is inaccurate because salamanders are in fact amphibians. They may have done this because earlier art historians were quick to identify them as lizard effigies before considering that no lizards inhabited the region in which they were discovered. Out of all the different cold-blooded organisms, turtles are by far the most uncommon, and the only known examples of the turtle effigies are stone pipes, never clay. Such as the birds carried symbolic allusions to the spiritual beliefs of the Haudenosaunee people, the turtle was also a very important part of this religion. The Iroquois creation story tells of a great cosmological turtle known as the Hah-nu-nah carrying the Earth on its back. In addition to the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic pipes, there is also a third category, pipes depicting human and beast hybrid creatures. As of 1979, only two of such pipes have ever been found, one of them being a cross between a human and a bear, and the other a human and an owl. It is worth mentioning that the designs of the Iroquois animal effigy pipes remained relatively consistent for most of the individual animal species portrayed over the span of centuries with very little innovation.

Not every smoking pipe was an effigy, many of them were simple shapes in both the Iroquois and Hopewell civilizations. In fact, regarding Iroquois pipes, Anthony Wonderley of American Antiquity writes “A minority of them [pipes] (less than 25 percent) carried effigies, that is, naturalistic images of humanoids, birds, mammals, reptiles, and other subjects created on the bowl facing the smoker.” The most common shape for these pipes was an obtuse elbow-like bend joining the stem with the cone-shaped bowl which widened at the top. The term” Dougherty pipe” became used to refer to a particular style of motif on some of these elbow pipes with a horizontally ribbed texture running up and down the bowl and a stylized geometric pattern”usually including vertical lines and at least two small, round, concave depressions”on the side of said bowl facing the smoker. There is also evidence to suggest that the Dougherty pipes often carried a narrative, with symbolic visual representation religious stories. Another style, referred to as the boat pipe, featured a bowl not much deeper than the others, but with a comically wide diameter. Non-effigy pipes were also very common among the Hopewell, though they were almost exclusively platform pipes. Most of them featured the standard flat or slightly-curved rectangular base, though more bent v-shaped pipes have also been unearthed but only in Illinois. Instead of a carving of an animal, the bowl of the more basic platform pipes was a simple cylinder. This stands in contrast to the more conical bowls on many of the Iroquois pipes. Some of the cylindrical bowls featured rimmed lips around the top, some formed more of a spool shape with the rim, and others remained smooth throughout. Overall, the rudimentary pipes may not have been the most artistic, but it’s the functionality that’s important.

Among the Iroquois, the smoking rituals themselves were vastly more widespread than that of the Hopewell and occurred with a much greater frequency as well. In fact, one of the prevailing theories behind the etymology of the world, Iroquois that it was derived from the Mohawk word, ierowka, meaning “they who smoke”. Smoking pipes were readily available to Haudenosaunee commoners as opposed to the Hopewell who restricted access nearly exclusively to the nobility. This also led to the Iroquois smoking for recreation, unlike the strictly ceremonial smoking amongst the Hopewell. Being the older culture of the two by well over a millennium, well-documented information regarding the Hopewell is much harder to come by, leaving crucial details of their history unknown. Because they were often found buried with the dead, one of the only known smoking rituals practiced by the Hopewell was as part of funerals. In volume 53 of The Central States Archaeological Journal, Gelbach writes, 

In burial ritual there were several primary roles that Hopewell pipes might have played. One was an operational role to establish the sacred pipe as an instrument for communal worship to be smoked in common on special occasions by neighboring ritual-dependent people. It has been theorized the act of smoking the pipe or acting out the smoking event also served to release the soul or spirit of the deceased to travel to another world or universe.

Communal bonding and saying farewell to the deceased as they pass on to the other side are believed to be two of the only uses of the Hopewell platform pipes though even this is largely based on speculation. As for the Iroquois, pipes were used for a multitude of different rituals, but the most significant were the peace pipes used in diplomatic ceremonies. This would entail leaders from the two factions involved sitting around in a circular arrangement and taking turns passing the pipe around to inhale the smoke to signify a mutual agreement similar to signing a peace treaty. In modern times, the most common reason for Iroquois to partake in ceremonial smoking is public-speaking, because it is believed to give the speaker better focus and a more relaxed posture.

To review, the Iroquois and the Hopewell were two Native American cultures renowned for their iconic smoking pipes. The Iroquois’ pipes were crafted in a wide variety of different shapes and styles while the Hopewell produced almost exclusively platform pipes. Both cultures depicted animal effigies in many of these pieces but human effigy pipes were more of an Iroquois phenomenon. In Iroquois culture, pipes were used by a much greater chunk of the population than they were for the Hopewell. Scholars believe that smoking pipes were used in Hopewell funerals though their exact purpose and symbolism remains the subject of debate due to lack of recorded history. Despite all of this, a surprising amount of the pipes discovered appear remarkably well-preserved.

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