A hundred years after he bought it, Warren’s cup is now on permanent public display here in the Museum, and it serves a very useful purpose. It’s not just a superb piece of Roman imperial metalwork: from party cup to scandalous vessel and finally to an iconic museum piece, this object reminds us that the way societies view sexual relationships is never fixed.
37
North American Otter Pipe
Stone pipe, from Mound City, Ohio, USA
200 BC–AD 100
The British Museum can demonstrate the changing views of society on many matters, not just sex. Here we have an object that once carried enormous social significance but is now virtually banned from all public gatherings: the tobacco pipe. Smoking, with its pleasures and perils, has a long history, and this pipe shows that it was going strong 2,000 years ago in North America.
The pipe shown here is about the size and shape of a kazoo. It is not like a modern pipe, with a long stem and a bowl at one end; instead, it is carved in reddish stone and has a flat base about 10 centimetres (4 inches) long, so it’s almost exactly the colour and size of a bourbon biscuit. One end is carved with a small hole to serve as the mouth piece. The pipe bowl is halfway down, but it’s no simple hollow for holding the tobacco; it’s in the shape of the upper half of a swimming otter with its paws perched on the bank of a river, as if it’s just popped up out of the water to look around. The stone is smooth, and it beautifully suggests the sleek wet fur of the animal. The otter looks along the pipe so that, as you smoke it, you and the otter are gazing into each other’s eyes. But in fact the smoker is even closer to this animal than that suggests: if you put it to your mouth you discover that you are nose to nose with the otter. That contact would have been even more striking originally than it is now, because the empty eye sockets would have been inlaid with freshwater pearls. This wonderfully crafted and evocative object pinpoints in history the world’s earliest use of tobacco pipes. This is where the story of pipe-smoking begins.
Although smoking is now largely seen as a fatal vice, 2,000 years ago in North America pipe-smoking was a fundamental ceremonial and religious part of human life. Different groups of Native Americans lived across the continent, in ways much more varied than Hollywood westerns would suggest. Those Americans living in Middle America – the lands around the mighty Mississippi and Ohio rivers, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes – were farmers. They had no cities, but they did reshape their vast landscape with extraordinary monuments. While their small farming and trading communities seem to have lived apart, they died together, joining forces to build enormous earthworks as gathering places for ceremonies and to bury their dead. Within the earthworks were graves rich with decorative objects and weapons crafted from exotic raw materials traded over huge distances: there were the teeth of grizzly bears from the Rocky Mountains, conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, mica from the Appalachian Mountains and copper from the Great Lakes. These spectacular sculpted burial mounds would later astonish visiting Europeans. One group in particular, popularly known as ‘Mound City’, is in present-day Ohio – an enclosed 13-acre site with twenty-four separate burial mounds. In one of the mounds there were around 200 stone pipes, one of which is our otter pipe.
The pipe comes from the period from which we have the earliest evidence for tobacco use in North America. Tobacco was first cultivated in Central and South America, and smoked wrapped in the leaves of other plants, rather like a cigar. In the colder north, though, there were no wrapping leaves to be had through the long winters, and smokers had to find another way of containing their tobacco – so they made pipes. The cigar/pipe divide seems in part to have been a result of climate.
Stone pipes are found consistently in the Ohio burial mounds, which indicates that they must have had some special place in the lives of the people who made and used them. Although archaeologists haven’t yet understood their precise meaning, we can make an informed guess about how they may have been regarded. Here’s the view of the Native American historian Dr Gabrielle Tayac, curator of the National Museum of the American Indian:
There’s a whole cosmology and theology that goes with pipes. They carry with them all of the meanings of religious teachings. They are definitely considered to be living beings that should be treated as such, rather than as just objects, or even sacred objects, that come alive and come into their own power when the bowl is united with the stem. For example, if a pipe is made of the red pipestone, it’s considered to be the blood and bones of buffalo. There are rituals and initiations and tremendous responsibilities that go along with being a pipe-carrier in particular places.
We know that 2,000 years ago only select members of the community were buried in the mounds. Many of them must have played a key part in rituals, because fragments of ceremonial costumes have been found with the bodies – headdresses made from bear, wolf and deer skulls. The animal world seems to have had a central role in the spiritual life of these people – our otter pipe is just one of a whole pipe menagerie: there are bowls shaped like wild cats, turtles, toads, squirrels, birds, fishes and even birds eating fishes. Perhaps the animals on the pipes had a role in some kind of shamanic ritual connecting the physical and spiritual worlds. The tobacco smoked at the time was Nicotiana rustica, which produces a heightened state of awareness and has a hallucinogenic effect: given that he or she would be eyeball to eyeball with the creature sculpted on it, we can imagine the smoker entering into a kind of transcendent state in which the animal would come to life. Perhaps each animal served as a spirit guide or totem to the person smoking; certainly for later Native American peoples it’s known that they might dream of an animal whose spirit would then protect them throughout their life. Gabrielle Tayac comments:
Native people still use tobacco, it’s a very sacred item. The usage of tobacco smoke is a way of transforming prayer and thought and community expression. Pipes could either be smoked individually or passed around a community or a family, so that it’s a way of unifying the mind and then sending up the power of the mind into the vast Universe or to the creator or intercessors. When you talk about the ‘peace pipe’ at a treaty negotiation, that is more meaningful than to sign a document. It’s a way of sealing a deal not just legally but by giving a vow and confirming that to the larger Universe, so it’s not just between humans, it’s between humans and the greater powers that are there.
Even today among Native Americans, smoking can still be a spiritual act – the smoke rises and mingles, bearing unified prayers skywards, and as it does so it combines the hopes and wishes of the whole community.
Europeans discovered smoking very late, in the sixteenth century. For them, smoking tobacco quickly became less about religion than about relaxation – though it has to be said that from the outset there were critics. No modern government health warning can begin to match the verve of the great Counterblaste to Tobacco published by King James 1 in 1604, just months after he had come from Edinburgh to succeed Queen Elizabeth. The newly arrived king denounced smoking as ‘A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.’
But very soon tobacco began its association with money. When the British colonized Virginia the emerging tobacco market in Europe rapidly became of prime economic importance – Bremen and Bristol, Glasgow and Dieppe all grew rich on American tobacco. As Europeans penetrated deeper into the continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tobacco became an article of trade and currency in its own right. The European acquisition of tobacco and European pipe-smoking symbolize for many Native Americans the expropriation of their homeland by intruders.
From then on, in Europe and most of the world, smoking became an activity associated with pure pleasure, daily habit and considerable cool. For most of the twentieth century, film stars puffed away on screen while their cinema audiences admired them through answering clo
uds of smoke. Smoking was not only sophisticated: it was intellectual and meditative, and Sherlock Holmes famously described one particularly testing case as ‘quite a three-pipe problem’. There was of course also the intensely enjoyable personal engagement with the physical object. The famous pipeman and politician Tony Benn fondly recalls those days:
Stanley Baldwin smoked a pipe, Harold Wilson smoked a pipe – it was a very normal thing to do, and of course there is the pipe of peace, pipes associated with friendships and sitting round together, and so on. So they do have a meaning over and above the satisfaction of smoking. It’s a sort of hobby in a way – you scrape it and clean it and fill it and tap it and light it, it goes out and you light it again, and if you were asked a question at a meeting – not that you can smoke in meetings any more – you could light your pipe and say ‘that’s a very good question’ – it gives you a little bit of time to think of the answer. But I wouldn’t recommend anybody else to start smoking.
The overthrow of smoking in the Western world in the past thirty years has been an extraordinary revolution. In Hollywood movies now, only the ‘baddies’ smoke, and the audience not at all; anybody caught smoking would be hounded out of the cinema. James I would be delighted. As we saw with the Warren Cup, what societies deem allowable as pleasure is constantly and unpredictably negotiated.
38
Ceremonial Ballgame Belt
Stone belt, found in Mexico
AD 100–500
In the Mexican gallery of the British Museum we have what looks like a giant stone horseshoe – it’s about 40 centimetres (15 inches) long and about 12 centimetres (4 inches) thick, and it is made of a very beautiful grey-green speckled stone. When it first came to the Museum in the 1860s it was thought to be a yoke for something like a carthorse. But there were two immediate problems with this idea: the object is very heavy, nearly 40 kilos (90 lbs), and in any case there were no carthorses or draught animals in Central America until the Spaniards brought them from Europe in the sixteenth century.
It was only just over fifty years ago that it was generally understood that these stone sculptures had nothing to do with animals: they were carvings of objects meant to be worn by men. They represent the padded belts made of cloth or basketwork worn to protect the hips during ancient Central American ball games. Some of these stone ‘belts’ may have been moulds used to shape lighter cloth or leather padding, and the one we have in the Museum is so heavy that if it was worn it can only have been for a very brief time. We don’t know exactly when or how it might originally have been worn; in fact we don’t know if it was meant to be worn at all.
A leading expert on these games, Michael Whittington, thinks these stone belts were primarily for ceremonial use:
Wearing an object that’s 75–100 lbs around your waist during an athletic competition will slow you down considerably, so they were probably worn as part of the ritual ceremonies at the beginning of the game. They do represent the real yokes that were worn during the ball game, but those real yokes were of perishable materials and they in almost all circumstances have not survived.
We know a little about this Central American ball game because it was quite frequently represented by local artists, who over hundreds of years made sculptures of players and models of pitches with the public sitting on the walls of the court watching the players. Later European visitors wrote accounts the game, and several stadia built specially for it still survive today. When the Spaniards arrived they were amazed by the ball that the game was played with, because it was made of a substance entirely new to Europeans – rubber. The very first view of a bouncing ball, a round object seemingly defying gravity and shooting around in random directions, must have been extremely disconcerting. The Spanish Dominican friar Diego Durán reported a sighting:
They call the material of this ball hule [rubber] … jumping and bouncing are its qualities, upward and downward, to and fro. It can exhaust the pursuer running after it before he can catch up with it.
This was not an easy game. The rubber ball was heavy – it could weigh anywhere from 3 or 4 kilos (8 lbs) to almost 15 kilos (30 lbs) – and the aim was to keep it in the air and eventually to land it in the opponents’ end of the court. Players were not allowed to use their hands, head or feet, but had to use their buttocks, forearms and above all their hips – which is where a padded belt would have been most useful. The belts actually used in the game, probably made of leather, wood and woven plants, had to be strong in order to protect the wearer from the heavy ball but light enough to allow him to move about the court. In 1528 the Spanish brought two Aztec players to Europe, and a German artist painted them in mid game, back to back, virtually naked, wearing what look like specially reinforced briefs with the ball in flight between them. The exact rules of the game are unclear and may have changed over the centuries, as well as varying throughout Central America’s different communities. What we do know is that it was played in teams of between two and seven players, and scoring was based on the result of faults, as in tennis today. These faults included touching the ball with a prohibited part of the body such as the head or the hand, failing to return it and sending it out of the court.
The eyes and mouth of the toad on the belt
The balls also became a kind of currency. Spaniards recorded the Aztecs’ exacting tribute payments of 16,000 rubber balls. Not many balls have survived, but excavations and finds made by farmers across Mexico and Central America have turned up a few, as well as hundreds of stone belts like ours and stone reliefs and sculptures showing players with belts around their waists.
By the time our belt was made, around 2,000 years ago, elaborate stone courts built specially for the game were being used. Many were rectangular and several had long sloping walls off which the ball could be bounced. Spectators could also sit along the top of these great stone structures and watch the matches unfold. Clay models show supporters cheering on the players and enjoying the game, just as football fans do today.
But these games were far more than just competitive sports: they held a special place in the belief system of the ancient Central Americans, and our stone belt is a clue to these hidden beliefs. Along the outside of the belt are carved designs, and on the front of the curve of the horseshoe shape, cut into the polished stone, is the stylized image of a toad. He has a broad mouth stretching the whole length of the curve and, behind the eyes, bulbous glands which extend back to the crouched hind legs. Zoologists have been able to identify the species as the Giant Mexican Toad (Bufo marinus). Perhaps the key to understanding this object is that this toad excretes a hallucinogenic substance, and Central Americans believed that it represented an Earth goddess. Belts for ball games were made with various underworld animals carved into them, and this tells us that they were meant to be viewed not individually but rather as part of a broader ritual. It seems that the painful intensity of the ball game symbolized the constant cosmic struggle between the forces of life and death. Michael Whittington elaborates:
I think it’s a metaphor for how Meso-Americans view the world. When you look at one of the great creation stories in Meso-America, the Popol Vuh, there are twins. Their names were Xbalanque and Hunahpuh. They were ball players, they lived in the underworld, and they played ball with the lords of death. The game re-emphasized how Meso-Americans viewed themselves in the cosmos and in relation to the gods. So they were playing out a game of gods and the lords of death every time they took to the ball court.
This is disconcertingly familiar. Whether it’s Maradona’s infamous ‘hand of God’, which he claimed scored his first goal in Argentina’s match against England in the 1986 World Cup, the carrying of the flame from the sanctuary at Olympia in Greece at the start of each Olympic Games, or Welsh rugby fans singing hymns at Cardiff Arms Park, competitive sport and religion seem often to be closely related. Few supporters today, singing hymns or cheering for their teams with fanatical enthusiasm, know that the world’s earliest known team sport also had a strong re
ligious dimension or that the story began not in ancient Greece but in Central America.
But modern sportsmen don’t face the hazards of their predecessors. It used to be thought that the losing team was always sacrificially slaughtered, and, though this did occasionally happen later, at the time of our belt we don’t know what lay in store for the losers. Mostly the games were an opportunity for a community to feast, to worship, and to create and reaffirm social ties. It’s thought that early on this was a game that both men and women could play, but by the time the Spanish encountered the Aztecs in the sixteenth century it was being played exclusively by men. The ball courts were designed to be sacred spaces in which offerings were buried, so making the building itself a living entity. The Spanish recognized the religious significance of the courts and wanted to replace the old local pagan religion with their new Catholic one. It is no accident that they built their cathedral in what is today Mexico City on the site of the Great Ball Court of the ancient Aztec city Tenochtitlán. But, although the courts were destroyed or abandoned, the game survived the brutal conquest of Mexico and the destruction of Aztec culture. A form of it, called ulama, is even played today – proof, if any was needed, that once a sport embodies a national identity as this one does, it has enormous staying power.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 22