HEAT, LIGHT, & SMOKE
Ceramics play a central role in fulfilling basic human needs for heat and light, as well as offering ways to enjoy tobacco, whether it is smoked, inhaled, or chewed. Up until around 1800, oil extracted from plants and animals fueled lamps, providing illumination beyond daylight hours. Earthenware cooking vessels and stoves made of ceramic tiles made hot meals possible.
Tobacco’s many forms—including snuff, chewing tobacco, and leaves shredded for pipes and fashioned into cigars and cigarettes—prompted many smoking devices and containers. Aromatic smoke of a different sort is produced by incense, typically a mixture of plant-based materials. First produced in China, incense has inspired many ceramic and metal vessel designs.
Tobacco gifts, offerings, and pipe smoking have long been part of the spiritual and diplomatic ceremonies among Indigenous people of the Americas. Governor John Carver and Massasoit Ousamequin are believed to have shared a pipe in 1621 to mark the alliance between colonists and the Wampanoag Nation. The colonists broke this alliance in 1675 in King Philip’s War, when they attempted to annihilate the Wampanoag Nation and their Narragansett neighbors, whose ancestral lands lay in what is now Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
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