This assignment entails selecting one object from the past and one object from the present and making
contextual comparisons between the two. That is, whom, when, how, and why were they used.
Smoking pipes from Ancient Central America and Mexico, 700 A.D
Current Day Cigarettes, 2023
The objects I chose for this assignment are the clay smoking pipes of Central America in what can be assumed as the Post-Classical Period and the modern-day smoking pipe. While today, tobacco is one of the most widely used plant substances by most of the world, their epidemic can be traced back thousands of years. Nicotine can be traced back to 1300 years ago or 700 A.D. It is believed that smoking first started with ritual and incense burning but eventually shifted to be a more leisurely and pleasurable practice. Nicotine and wild tobacco can be traced back to the Mayans, but they also smoked other herbs and grasses as a medicine. The Mayans would offer tobacco, as we know it today, to the gods. However, due to the more severe side effects, a stronger plant species was believed to be used in their practice.
A present object can be difficult to name because while tobacco is still widely used and smoking from a pipe is not unheard of, it is definitely a minority. If we want to find a current object that is just as widely used now as the pipe in 700 A.D, it would have to be cigarettes, not modern-day smoking pipes. Cigarettes were developed from a similar smoking technique of rolling scraps of paper with herbs and have become widely used because of their addictive nature and the convenience over pipes. Smoking in the United States has a legal age of 21, so the population consists of adults. It is commonly found in many adults both globally and in the U.S. Smoking tobacco today is still used for leisure purposes. Still, in the U.S., there has been a significant shift in the use of Marijuana both in states that have it legalized for recreational use and those that don’t. I selected the smoking pipe for this assignment because the shift in smoking substances has shocked me since moving to New York, and it is fascinating to look at how Marijuana is only now being legalized while tobacco is incorporated into history.