Tubular smoking pipes were often buried with the deceased at prehistoric cemeteries. Although similar pipes have been found throughout Texas, they are not numerous. Likely their use was reserved for special occasions. Ethnographic accounts from other areas provide descriptions of large tubular pipes used as “cloudblowers” and as medicine tubes, used by shamans for curing and in ritual. The pipes shown here are three of the twelve specimens recovered from the Loma Sandia cemetery. All are made of sandstone, a readily available raw material in south Texas.  Suitable pieces of stone were probably first pecked and ground to a tubular shape, then drilled biconically (from both ends) to create the bore hole (which was also ground smooth) for the stem and bowl opening. The pipe shown in center was recovered with the bone stem intact. Several of the pipes contained charred residue in their interiors. Although submitted for microscopic analysis, the charred remains could not be identified (chemical analysis of residues was not attempted).

The artistic rendering at right  is by artist and archeologist Frank Weir and is from the cover of Vol. 2 of the 1995 Loma Sandia site report by Anna Jean Taylor and Cheryl Lynn Highley (Studies in Archeology 20, Texas Archeological Research Laboratory).  The photographs are from the UTSA-CAR archives.