"Analyzing locally made tobacco clay pipes, Anna Agbe-Davies shows us that ethnic groups and races are socially constructed categories. Using new analytical techniques and classification schemes, Agbe-Davies develops an important investigation that challenges some of our traditional views of material culture. Tobacco, Pipes, and Race in Colonial Virginia is destined to become one of the influential treatises in our discipline." --Paul A. Shackel, University of Maryland " Tobacco, Pipes and Race in Colonial Virginia: Little Tubes of Mighty Power is an important contribution to our understanding of the production and exchange of pipes in the slave society of the colonial Chesapeake. It is also a thought-provoking meditation on how historical archaeologists conceive of and categorize data from the past (pipes and people) and the implications of these categories in the present. This book will engage students, archaeologists and other scholars for whom materiality is central to an understanding of past social relationships and their legacy today." --Barbara Heath, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Graduate Coordinator, University of Tennessee "Anna S.

Agbe-Davies's study of "little tubes of mighty power" is carried out with theoretical sophistication and methodological rigor. Moving beyond issues of identity revealed by decorative aspects of clay pipes, Agbe-Davies transforms the analysis and discussion of this artifact class into one of power, agency, and social relations in colonial Virginia. In doing so, she skillfully maneuvers between the mindsets of seventeenth-century Virginians and twenty-first century archaeologists through the application of a critical systematics. This is an important book, one which should be read by social archaeologists, social historians, and students of these fields." --Peter E. Siegel, Dept of Anthropology and Center for Heritage & Archaeological Studies, Montclair State University.