Archaeology in a New Light

Plimoth Patuxet Museums is known for its living history sites depicting the seventeenth-century Pilgrim settlement of Plymouth and the Wampanoag settlement of Patuxet. With the 400th anniversary of Mayflower’s arrival, the museum recommitted itself to presenting archaeology. Because of the challenges of publicly interpreting archaeology, the broad swath of time covered by archaeology, and the reality that most guests know little about either Indigenous history or archaeology, integrating archaeological programming into the living history format proved challenging, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. By employing a multipronged physical and digital approach, the authors have found some success in bringing a more nuanced understanding of archaeology to the institution’s stakeholders.