A wide variety of artifacts other than those in the above categories have been found at Magdalena de Cao Viejo. They include incised gourds, hide carrying slings, wax candles from the church, and other items. We found glass beads, perhaps from a rosary, as well as small fragments of glass that may be from earrings, drinking glasses, or some other decorated item. Various items of straw and other fibers have also been encountered, including what appears to be a possible fragment of a door in the Colonial Town. As our work continues we will study these artifacts and report on them on the pages of this web site.

One of the most intriguing artifact types we discovered were the ends (“butts”) of smoked cigarettes. The paper used consisted of torn colonial documents. The “smoking mixture” was identified as tobacco. The tobacco from one example was analyzed through Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) at the University of Arizona and subsequently calibrated courtesy of the Beta-Analytic company. The resulting conventional radiocarbon age was 440 +/- 80 BP and the 2-sigma calibrated age range was 1390 – 1640 A.D. (another range of 1320 to 1350 is rejected as too early). Since the colonial paper must date to post-1532, and more likely post-1578, we can safely state that the cigarette was smoked some time between 1578 and 1640.

To the best of our knowledge this is the earliest evidence for cigarette smoking in the Western European tradition. Tobacco is a Native American plant and the Maya and Caribbean people smoked cigars and, possibly, cigarettes (tobacco rolled in paper instead of tobacco leaves) in antiquity. In the West, cigarette smoking was virtually unknown until British soldiers adopted the practice from their Turkish allies during the Crimean War (1854-1856). Even so, cigarettes were not commonly smoked until after World War I when the ease of the method and its short duration (compared to pipes or cigars) was advantageous in trench warfare. We have identified about a dozen cigarette butts at Magdalena, however, indicating that the custom was practiced locally, even if it never became common beyond the community or region.