Archaeology helps us tell the stories of our past where historical documents are silent.On the 400th anniversary of the sailing of this Mayfloever in 1620,we can see this in two complementary ways:first,in the continuing story that’s unfolding about the ship itself. The first Mayflower sailed back to England in spring 1621. An appraisal of 1624 indicates the ship was in ruins; its own substance might have been sold for scrap.A full-scale reproduction designed by naval architect William Avery Baker was constructed between 1955 and 1957 in Brixham, England, as a present to Americans in the British men and women. Within the course of 60 years in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Mayflower II has welcomed some 25 million people aboard to imagine the Pilgrims’ experiences on this historic crossing of the Atlantic.
Starting in 2016, the ship underwent a full recovery in Mystic Seaport Museum’s shipyard at Connecticut. An outstanding five-year collaboration between maritimeexperts and shipwrights in Plimoth Plantation and the Mystic Seaport Museum has preserved more than a quarter of their original 1950s construction, for example its keel. The hull planking is new Danish white pine in the royal forests of Denmark. Back in August 2020, the restorations complete, the Mayflocwer II sailed from Mystic back to Plymouth, in which it continues to serve its educational function as a floating classroom for experiential archaeology.
Equally intriguing is the way archaeology is illuminating the close connection between the Indigenous population and the Pilgrimsat the website the Wampanoag telephone Patuxet, along with the Europeans Plimoth. Excavations on Burial Hill in downtown Plymouth, conducted from the Plimoth Plantation Museum and the City of Plymouth in partnership with the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Fiske Center for Archaeological Research, are showing stories of a lively transcultural society.The revolutionary display History ina Necw Light is the first to exhibit artifacts from the Wampanoag community of Patuxet with people from the site of the original 1620 European village. The archaeological evidence of those overlapping landscapes is leading scholars to reevaluate our comprehension of daily life in early Plymouth and the character of ColonialIndigenous interactions. It is fitting, in acknowledgement of its site about what was theancestral home of the Wampanoag and other Native American communities for 12,000 years before the Mayflower’s arrival in 1620, that Plimoth Plantation Museum has chosen to change its title to Plimoth-Patuxet in this 400th commemoration year.