The Tobacco Takers: Puritans, Pipes, and Bodily Care

Indigenous to the Americas and cultivated by Native peoples for thousands of years, tobacco was introduced to Europeans in the 16th century, and by the early 17th century, it had spread across the globe. In Puritan New England, religious leaders condemned tobacco as sinful while early practitioners used it as medicine. Clay tobacco pipes commonly found at 17th-century archaeological sites in Massachusetts reveal widespread use despite strict social and religious restrictions. Drawing from her new book, The Tobacco Takers: Puritanism, Smoking, Health, and the Archaeology of Bodily Care (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026), Diana DiPaolo Loren, deputy director for curatorial affairs and senior curator at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, will share archaeological, archival, and visual evidence that recasts tobacco and tobacco pipes as tools of bodily care for both physical and metaphysical ailments. The program will include a conversation with archaeologist Stephen W. Silliman.

Copies of The Tobacco Takers will be available for purchase after the program. Advance registration is recommended.

Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.