When Smoking Pipes Grow Fins

Abstract

This paper chronicles how Indigenous-made stone “vasiform” smoking pipes from Ontario foster fresh perspectives on archaeological and anthropological approaches to representation and meaning. These discussions often undervalue the material world, whereas recent emphases on “things themselves” tend to neglect issues of representation, meaning, and symbolism. Variations in smoking pipe form, including several examples of pipes that resemble fish, point to the importance of more-than-representational approaches. Considering how and why a few pipes “grew fins” while the majority remained “bedded down” speaks to the importance of beginning discussions of representation and meaning from postanthropocentric vantages that recognize the vibrancy of matter. The pipes offer an opportunity to revisit the long-standing tension between matter and meaning, providing new angles of articulation with two complementary lines of thought—assemblage theory and Peircean semiotics. Both theories align with “nonrepresentational” critiques, postanthropocentrism, and relational ontologies, but archaeologists rarely consider the two together. The emergent relationship between vasiform pipes, assemblage theory, and Peircean semiotics documented in this article offers useful ways to continue challenging the deep-seated matter-meaning dualism in archaeological thought.

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