{"id":351201,"date":"2026-07-24T15:46:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T15:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/351201\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T15:46:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T15:46:22","slug":"students-in-florida-discovered-a-400-year-old-intact-pot-that-reveals-conflict-among-indigenous-spanish-and-english-powers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/351201\/","title":{"rendered":"Students in Florida Discovered a 400-Year-Old Intact Pot That Reveals Conflict Among Indigenous, Spanish and English Powers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Archaeology students at the University of Florida discovered the rare vessel at the site of the former Mission San Francisco de Potano, established in 1606 when Florida was under Spanish rule<\/p>\n

\"Sarah<\/p>\n

\n

Sarah Kuta<\/a><\/p>\n

| Daily Correspondent<\/p>\n

July 24, 2026 10:09 a.m.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The pot was unearthed by University of Florida students this spring.
\n Kristen Grace \/ Florida Museum of Natural History<\/p>\n

Archaeologists in Florida discovered a rare, fully intact pot that was likely made by a member of the Potano Indigenous community roughly 400 years ago.<\/p>\n

The bowl-shaped vessel, which is made of clay, has a smooth, gray surface and a simple rim that flares slightly outward. Somehow, the entire pot survived centuries of pressure and shifting sediment to emerge unharmed earlier this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very unique,\u201d Gifford Waters<\/a>, historical archaeology collections manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, says in a statement<\/a> announcing the find. \u201cTypically, we find things that were broken and discarded.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Archaeologists say it\u2019s rare to find fully intact pots like this.<\/p>\n

Gifford Waters<\/p>\n

The pot was unearthed by University of Florida students taking an archaeology field course taught by Waters and Charles Cobb<\/a>, curator of historical archaeology at the museum, which is located on the university\u2019s campus in Gainesville. Students repeatedly visited a historic site in northwest Gainesville this spring to put their burgeoning excavation skills to the test\u2014and, one day, they struck archaeological gold when they recovered the intact pot.<\/p>\n

Starting in 1585, the site was home to a large village inhabited by the Potano people, an Indigenous sub-group of the broader Timucua culture forced from their homelands by Spanish settlers. In 1606, the Spanish government established a Catholic mission at the village, sending a lone friar to live among the Potano people at what became known as the Mission San Francisco de Potano.<\/p>\n

The site was a doctrina, the name given to large missions with resident friars. Visitas, by contrast, were smaller missions that received visits from friars living at nearby doctrinas. According to archaeologists, it was common practice for the Spanish to establish doctrinas in large Native American villages and then attempt to convert the group\u2019s chief.<\/p>\n

In this type of community, for the friar, \u201cit was a very difficult life,\u201d Michael Gannon, a historian who worked on earlier digs at the site, told the Gainesville Sun<\/a>\u2019s Sarah L. Stewart in 2006.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The vessel was crafted in a style unfamiliar to archaeologists.<\/p>\n

Kristen Grace \/ Florida Museum of Natural History<\/p>\n

The Mission San Francisco de Potano was just one of the many Spanish missions<\/a> established along el camino real, or \u201cthe royal road,\u201d an east-west route used in the 16th and 17th centuries.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn La Florida, the Camino Real helped move people and supplies between the capital at St. Augustine and the more than 100 missions located to its west among native populations living on the frontier,\u201d according to the Florida Division of Historical Resources<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Mission San Francisco de Potano was briefly abandoned in 1656 after the Timucua people launched a rebellion against Spanish colonial rule. However, once the Spanish quashed the uprising, they reestablished the mission a few years later. The site was abandoned for good in 1706, when it was destroyed by English raiders.<\/p>\n

\"Archaeologists<\/p>\n

The students are enrolled in an archaeology fieldwork class.<\/p>\n

Brooke Bowser \/ Florida Museum of Natural History<\/p>\n

For centuries, Mission San Francisco de Potano was largely lost to history\u2014until artifacts began resurfacing in the 1950s. Modern excavations have been underway since 2006.<\/p>\n

Since then, researchers have recovered more than 7,000 items and counting. Most of what they\u2019ve unearthed has been Indigenous pottery, but they\u2019ve also discovered bells, religious pendants<\/a>, glass beads, stone tools, nails and the bones of turtles, freshwater fish, turkey and other animals. Many of the bones have been recovered from the same area, which the researchers suspect was once used for cooking and garbage.<\/p>\n

In 2006, archaeologists discovered the remains of large, Spanish-built wooden posts, as well as the remnants of clay footings that may have been used to stabilize them. They think the posts were once part of the mission\u2019s church or school or the friar\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of the very few sites that I\u2019ve ever worked on that there aren\u2019t any modern disturbances,\u201d Waters told the Gainesville Sun<\/a> in 2006. \u201cOut here, as far as we can tell, there\u2019s been nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did you know? Founding Florida<\/p>\n

Spain founded the first permanent European settlement in what is now the U.S. in 1565 at St. Augustine<\/a>, Florida. That predates English settlements at Jamestown<\/a> and Plymouth<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The newly discovered pot was found inside a Spanish-made structure, though archaeologists don\u2019t know exactly what purpose the building served. Based on the discovery of gun components nearby, they think it might have been a barrack for Spanish soldiers sent to the site in the early 1700s.<\/p>\n

The vessel itself was crafted in a style unfamiliar to archaeologists. It probably wasn\u2019t used for cooking over a fire, because it doesn\u2019t bear any traces of charcoal residue. Researchers did notice faint scorch marks on the pot, which may have come from placing it near a fire to warm individual portions of food. However, the marks could also have been a byproduct of the firing process, when the vessel was heated to harden the clay and make it durable.<\/p>\n

Many other questions remain unanswered. Chief among them: Why was the pot discarded centuries ago?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t leave things behind that you can still use, so why was this purposefully put into a pit?\u201d Waters says in the statement.<\/p>\n

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Archaeology students at the University of Florida discovered the rare vessel at the site of the former Mission…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-351201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}