[7] Due to the confusion as to which ethnic group was responsible for their manufacture, similarities with a type of North American ceramic earthenware known as colonoware have been made.
It would only be in the 18th century that the concept of firmly dividing society up into ethnic groups became acceptable in the region, when laws preventing inter-ethnic marriage were introduced.
[9] The Native American tribes of the Chesapeake region, who were Algonquian speakers, had made use of a type of "relatively small, clay, conical-bowled, obtuse- or right-angled elbow pipe" prior to European and African colonization of the area.
[13] Western Africans had been smoking tobacco since it was introduced to the area by European traders in the early 16th century, although it remains unknown how prevalent it had become by the seventeenth.
[14] Some native African pipe-making manufacturers had been set up, for archaeologists have unearthed locally made clay pipes dating from 17th century Ghana and Mali.
[15] Archaeologist Matthew C. Emerson argued that some of those slaves purchased in West Africa and transported to North America brought their own pipe-making techniques with them, highlighting the similarities between certain pipe forms found on the two continents.
[21] Motifs or symbols were in many cases stamped or incised into the clay pipe, depicting such things as stars, ships, boats, tobacco plants, hearts, humans, animals and geometric shapes.
Emerson noted the many issues that prevent archaeologists finding such evidence, arguing that any metal molds that had been used in their production would have been melted down and recast for use elsewhere, rather than being abandoned and left in the archaeological record.