Since opening its doors in 1998, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (MPMRC) has had an identity as both a tribal center and a museum committed to challenging the public’s conventional understandings of Native history in New England. Over a 15-year period, museum staff and the tribal community learned to work more collaboratively in an effort to document and illuminate Pequot survivance—the histories of Mashantucket families living and working in and against the modern world. A review of recent museum projects clarifies the benefits of collaboration while revealing how new exhibits and programs are impacting visitor experiences and understandings. Another kind of museum space is envisioned in which visitors, staff, and tribal members actively co-create exhibits and programs centered on Pequot survivance, using content informed by ongoing archaeological studies. In that space, co-creation practices would encourage social interaction—a collaborative pushing-and-pulling of ideas and stories in a shared search for new understandings of survivance at Mashantucket and beyond.

It is argued that much of American archaeological research proceeds in the ignorance of a fundamental paradox which continues to befuddle the rest of anthropology. If historical archaeology reinvents itself as the processual interpretation of emerging capitalist society, then it becomes less difficult to differentiate the practical reason of the modern West from premodern cultural orders. Henry Glassie and James Deetz have begun to renovate the discipline through a structuralist theory of meaning yet they have mischaracterized the history of early modern America. Data associated with a variety of historical episodes and institutions demonstrate that one characteristic of modern ideology — individualism — did not begin to emerge until well after the American Revolution. This process of cultural separations was reflected in both texts and artifacts, was enacted in everyday life, and seemed to represent new social and economic orders. While the analysis is preliminary, it does reveal that historical archaeology can be transformed through an alliance with Neo-Marxist thought.

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Museums, until recently, have been mostly silent about sexuality in the past. But as scholars from different disciplines continue to recover those still‐hidden histories, museums can become portals into other worlds and alternative understandings. New York's Museum of Sex exemplifies how to represent the diversity of sexual pasts in a city. As archaeologists deepen our understandings of gendered and sexual differences in ancient cities around the world, a longer and comparative history of sexuality can be exhibited.