In Brazil, as in most countries, history and natural history museums are the repositories of rich collections of excavated archaeological material. One of the major challenges in working with these collections is the paucity of information available regarding the original excavations, which raises important questions that archaeologists and museum studies professionals have been grappling with for several decades: what interpretive value do these collections have without any contextual information, and are they worth maintaining in museum archives that are facing continuing crises in space and resources? This article uses the concepts of entanglement and assemblage to discuss a collection of ceramics excavated from one of the first Spanish Jesuit missions in colonial Paraguay, San Ignacio Miní (1610–1631), and housed at the Museu Paranaense in Curitiba, Brazil. Despite the lack of contextual information from the 1963 excavation, we can begin to explore the entangled pasts, present, and future of these objects by tracing the trajectory of the collection from the initial formation through excavation and contemporary analysis. Innovative approaches are needed to address methodological and theoretical concerns in analyzing archaeological museum collections to ensure that the knowledge and potential insights entangled in these collections are not lost.

What kind of times are these when a talk about trees is almost a crime? Among other things, they are times of forgetfulness. Forgetting does not mean that reminiscences just vanish as time goes by. It is, on the contrary, a major cultural force grounded in a politics of anti-memory. One needs to forget in order to keep repeating oneself. In this article, I argue that the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro did not burn to the ground merely because of the lack of resources, but because being burned to the ground has always been a virtual feature of the existence of the museum since it was created in 1818. It burned as part of a long-term politics of anti-memory in Brazilian history.

Collections care practices have become professionalized in the last 30 years, in large part because of the work of organizations such as the American Alliance of Museums, the Canadian Conservation Institute, the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, the American Institute for Conservation, and others in the museum sphere. Advances in preservation and management have benefited the discipline of archaeology in the field and laboratory. This thematic issue provides an updated perspective on the current happenings in the repository, highlighting innovative techniques and practices that collections specialists employ when managing the archaeological record. This article considers a macroview of the issues surrounding archaeological curation today and ponders what the future of collections preservation can and should look like.