The Plimoth Patuxet Museum Controversy

Native Americans call for boycott of Plymouth living history museum

• Native Americans in Massachusetts are calling for a boycott of Plimoth Patuxet Museums, a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
• The museum features Colonial reenactors portraying life in Plymouth, the famous English settlement founded by the Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower.
• Members of the state's Wampanoag community and their supporters say the museum has not lived up to its promise of creating a "bi-cultural museum" that equally tells the story of the European and Indigenous peoples that lived there.
• The "Historic Patuxet Homesite," the portion of the mostly outdoor museum focused on traditional Indigenous life, is inadequately small, in need of repairs and staffed by workers who aren't from local tribes.
• Concerns come just two years after the museum changed its name from Plimoth Plantation to Plimoth Patuxet as part of a yearlong celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing.
• The museum declared the "new, more balanced" moniker reflected the importance of the Indigenous perspective to the museum's educational mission.
• Museum spokesperson Rob Kluin said the museum has expanded the outdoor Wampanoag exhibit, raised more than $2 million towards a new Indigenous programs building and has "several initiatives in place" to recruit and retain staff from Native communities.
• Carol Pollard, whose late brother Anthony "Nanepashemet" Pollard played a key role in the development of the museum's Indigenous programming as a leading Wampanoag historian, was among those dismayed at the state of the site.
• Museum officials for years ignored suggestions for modernizing and expanding the outdoor exhibit, say former museum staffers.
• Low pay and poor working conditions led to the departure of many long-standing Native staffers who built the program into a must-see attraction by showcasing authentic Indigenous farming, cooking, canoe building and other cultural practices.
• The Wampanoag Consulting Alliance, a Native group that includes former museum staffers, said in a statement that the museum has systematically dismantled the outdoor exhibit.
• Many steps taken to provide equal representation to Wampanoag programming have been removed, and the physical exhibit is in deplorable condition, leading to the virtually complete alienation of the Wampanoag communities.

Archaeologists and Chefs Join Forces to Recreate Ancient Recipes

• Scholars and chefs recently gathered in New York City to recreate ancient recipes.
• The event, “Appetite for the Past,” was hosted by New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
• Researchers use a combination of molecular evidence, archaeological analysis, and culinary instinct to recreate ancient recipes.
• Often, the task of understanding what people in the past ate and how they prepared and consumed it is an exercise in scientific inference and creativity.
• Residue and soot on ancient ceramic cooking pots can provide clues to the ingredients and cooking methods used in ancient recipes.
• Anthropological archaeologist Yitzchak Jaffe and anthropologist Karine Taché analyzed residue on an ancient ceramic cooking pot found in a Chinese cemetery.
• Lipid extraction, gas chromatography, and mass spectrometry were used to identify plant ingredients, including millet, in the residue.
• Raymond Childs, a chef at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, experimented with different ways of preparing millet to recreate the ancient recipe.
• The researchers determined that the pot had been used to cook a stew, probably simmered with the pot tipped on its side.
• The team added pork and eggplant to the stew to make it more palatable, as they did not have much else to go on beside millet.
• Researchers have used the limits of palatability as a guide to determine what ancient people weren't eating.
• The resulting millet-pork stew was served at the event and was well-received by the tasters.

Archaeologists and Chefs Join Forces to Recreate Ancient Recipes

• Scholars and chefs recently gathered in New York City to recreate ancient recipes.
• The event, “Appetite for the Past,” was hosted by New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
• Researchers use a combination of molecular evidence, archaeological analysis, and culinary instinct to recreate ancient recipes.
• Often, the task of understanding what people in the past ate and how they prepared and consumed it is an exercise in scientific inference and creativity.
• Residue and soot on ancient ceramic cooking pots can provide clues to the ingredients and cooking methods used in ancient recipes.
• Anthropological archaeologist Yitzchak Jaffe and anthropologist Karine Taché analyzed residue on an ancient ceramic cooking pot found in a Chinese cemetery.
• Lipid extraction, gas chromatography, and mass spectrometry were used to identify plant ingredients, including millet, in the residue.
• Raymond Childs, a chef at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, experimented with different ways of preparing millet to recreate the ancient recipe.
• The researchers determined that the pot had been used to cook a stew, probably simmered with the pot tipped on its side.
• The team added pork and eggplant to the stew to make it more palatable, as they did not have much else to go on beside millet.
• Researchers have used the limits of palatability as a guide to determine what ancient people weren't eating.
• The resulting millet-pork stew was served at the event and was well-received by the tasters.