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Conduits to the supernatural: Bifurcated snuff tubes in the pre-Columbian Caribbean


Pages: 45 - 67

Abstract

UK museum collections hold an important and largely unexplored corpus of Caribbean pre-Columbian cultural heritage, including seminal pieces that can offer new insights into the development of complex rituals in the region. This paper re-establishes the cultural context and significance of a previously undocumented carving related to cohoba drug rituals: an ornate, composite snuff tube carved of cannel coal, recovered from the Lesser Antillean island of St Vincent before 1870, and donated to Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum in 1900. Both the material (which does not occur in the insular Caribbean) and the carving style suggest that the snuff tube was an import from Venezuela's Lower Orinoco region, where the Barrancoid style emerged in its classic form ca. ~100 BC - AD 500 (Los Barrancos complex). As such, it is the earliest example of drug paraphernalia often assumed to have been used only after ~AD 1000, and isolated to the chiefdom-level societies of the Greater Antilles. This paper contributes a brief review of the St Vincent snuff tube within the context of other stone and wood examples in public collections in efforts to explore their diagnostics, range and, ultimately, the ceremonies in which they were used.