So it's not like any normal modern pipe with a long stem and a bowl at one end. The pipe I have here is about the size and shape of a kazoo, the children's toy music pipe that makes buzzing sounds when you blow through it. And in one of them there were around 200 stone pipes - one of which is our otter pipe.

One in particular is in present-day Ohio - popularly known as 'Mound City' - an enclosed 13-acre site with 24 separate burial mounds. These spectacular sculpted burial mounds would later astonish visiting Europeans. There were the teeth of grizzly bears from the Rocky Mountains, conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, mica from the Appalachian Mountains, and copper from the Great Lakes. And within them, were graves rich with weapons and decorative objects, crafted from exotic raw materials traded over huge distances. While the small farming and trading communities seem to have lived apart, they died together, joining forces to build enormous earthworks as gathering places for ceremonies and to bury their dead. They had no cities but they did re-shape their vast landscape with extraordinary monuments. Those Americans living in Middle America - the lands around the mighty Mississippi and Ohio rivers, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes - were farmers. Different groups of Native Americans lived across the continent - in ways much more varied than what's been caricatured since in the westerns. In the last programme, we had alcohol and sex today we are with smoking and altered states.Īlthough smoking now is largely seen as a fatal vice, two thousand years ago, in North America, pipe-smoking was a fundamental ceremonial and religious part of human life. In China and America, Europe and Mexico people shared many of the pleasures and pastimes, the obsessions and the intoxications, that continue to connect us across the millennia. This week I'm looking at the pleasures that bound people together around two thousand years ago, in the centuries following the birth of Christ. And it's a great comfort and a friend - I live alone.' (Tony Benn)

'In the morning the first thing I do before I have breakfast is perhaps light my pipe, and the last thing I do before I go to bed at night is to have a few puffs of my pipe. For example, if it's a pipe that's made of the red pipestone, it's considered to be the blood and bones of buffalo.' (Gabrielle Tayac) 'They are power objects, and they're not symbolic, they're actually considered to be alive. It's one that begins two thousand years ago in North America. Smoking, with its pleasures and its perils, has a long history. 'A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse.'

I have lived a thousand years audio