Tubular Pipe

A tubular pipe is a straight stone tube, usually 50–250 mm long and 13–50 mm across, bored through from end to end. The wider end served as the bowl and the narrow end as the mouthpiece, sometimes with a bone or wooden stem set into it. Some are cylinders; others are cigar-shaped or flare toward the bowl end (McGuire 1899; Texas Beyond History).

Pipes were pecked and ground to shape, then drilled from one or both ends, and the bore was reamed and ground smooth inside, widening it at the bowl end (McGuire 1899; Texas Beyond History). Materials include sandstone, steatite, serpentine, slate and pipestone; all twelve pipes from the Loma Sandia cemetery in Texas are sandstone, and one still had its bone stem.

Several Texas pipes held charred material that could not be identified, and Texas Beyond History cites accounts of large tubes used as "cloud-blowers" and of medicine tubes used by healers. McGuire (1899) cautioned that some thin, polished tubes may have been horns or other instruments rather than pipes. Hopewell platform pipes developed out of these tube pipes (Farnsworth et al. 2021). The key trait is a single straight stone tube drilled end to end, with no separate bowl.

Length 51–254 mm; diameter 13–51 mm (McGuire 1899, converted from inches). A serpentine example from Wilkes County, Georgia, is 178 mm long.

Widespread: southern Ontario and the Northeast, the Ohio Valley (Adena), Maryland (Delmarva Adena), the Southeast and south Texas (Donaldson and Wortner 1995; Applegate 2008; Melton and Luckenbach 2013; McGuire 1899; Texas Beyond History).

Look down the bore: a pipe widens into a bowl at one end, and some show blackening inside. Short tubes with an even bore are usually beads; Moorehead (1910) treated beads, tubes and tubular pipes as one graded series, so length and the bowl matter. Platform, elbow and effigy pipes have a separate bowl set on or at an angle to the stem. McGuire (1899) classed these as tubular pipes; "cloud-blower" is a later descriptive name for large ones. Pipestone tube pipes were deliberately broken in Delmarva Adena mortuary pits at Pig Point, Maryland (Melton and Luckenbach 2013). Farnsworth et al. (2021) place the shift from tube to platform pipes at the Early to Middle Woodland boundary, so tubes are generally older.