Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

Here, a family group sits down together to have some succotash, or a corn-based stew, the same meal Pequots have eaten for centuries. The arrival of Europeans has actually had little effect on most aspects of daily life. But look closely and you'll see some new goods and materials here.

We get these sturdy iron cooking pots from the Dutch and the English. They're much better than our ceramic pots, which break easily. We like brass kettles, too, like the one in front of you filled with mussels. In fact, brass is a material that we value just as much for how it looks as how it wears. The girl at the far left is eating with a brass spoon, and her father and mother both wear a brass bracelets. Look at the father's hand and you'll see that he's wearing two brass rings, one acquired through trade and the other made by our people; probably by cutting up an old kettle that was beyond repair.

Now look closely at the mother's necklace. It's made of glass trade beads, in beautiful colors that are hard for us to make with our plant dyes. And hanging from the necklace are three brass thimbles.

Behind the Scenes with Curator Steve Cook

think what's important to realize here is that just because the Pequots bought or acquired European trade goods, it doesn't mean that they simply bought into European culture. Absolutely not. There's very little that Native people adopted of European technology that didn't have some sort of Native precursor. The difference between a stone ax and an iron ax is just the material it's made of, not how you use it or why you use it. They both still chop wood. These things were incorporated into already existing patterns, and so they're not changing people's lives in drastic and dramatic ways.

That doesn't mean these things didn't introduce some change, though. For example, brass kettles were very desirable, not only because they were more durable than ceramic pots but also because when they wore out you could make a hundred other things out of them. Almost all of the brass objects in this scene could have been made from a brass kettle: the man's and woman's bracelets, the spoon that the girl is using to eat, the beads on the man making wampum, and the knife beside him. So over time brass and iron kettles began to replace Native ceramics. And because making ceramics is fairly complex, that skill was lost; probably by the beginning of the 18th century.