Dr. John E Worth

Since its discovery in 2015, the University of West Florida has conducted archaeological investigations at the site of Santa María de Ochuse, Tristán de Luna y Arellano’s 1559-1561 settlement on Pensacola Bay. After nearly four years of fieldwork and lab work, the site has
already revealed a substantial and diverse assemblage of artifacts associated with equipment, supplies, and provisions brought both collectively by the army and its companies and subordinate residential and dining units, and by individuals as personal goods. Moreover, the discovery of features such as trash pits and postholes supplement an increasingly detailed understanding of the horizontal distribution of artifacts to provide important clues regarding the layout of the 31-acre settlement and the activities conducted there, supplementing what the documentary record tells us about this site and the people who inhabited it. This paper provides an update of our current understanding of this important mid-sixteenth-century Spanish settlement.

Since the 2015 discovery of the 1559-1561 Tristán de Luna settlement in Pensacola, the University of West Florida has conducted archaeological investigations of the site of this earliest multi-year European settlement in the continental United States. Based on a comprehensive shovel-test survey, three summer field schools, and multiple mitigation projects in this residential neighborhood, we continue to learn about this short-lived colony. This paper discusses ongoing analysis of the spatial distribution of artifacts across the Luna settlement, focusing on the relative proportions of various functional artifact categories as a means for understanding patterns of residence and activity within the settlement.

Excavations at the terrestrial settlement of Tristán de Luna y Arellano on Pensacola Bay suggest that the material culture of the colonists at the site between 1559 and 1561 included a significant amount of contemporaneous Native American ceramics evidently scavenged along with food from evacuated communities along the coast and interior. Combined with newly-discovered documentation detailing the establishment and use of a road between Pensacola and the temporary Spanish settlement at Nanipacana in central Alabama, and deteriorating Native-Spanish relations during this period, these new data offer important insights into the indigenous social geography of this region at a pivotal time.

Long-term research by the University of West Florida into the 1559-1561 expedition of Tristán de Luna y Arellano to Pensacola Bay has only accelerated following the 2015 discovery of Luna’s terrestrial settlement and the 2016 discovery of a third shipwreck from Luna’s fleet that wrecked just offshore. In addition to ongoing archaeological investigations in the field and lab, concurrent syntheses and analysis of both previously-known and several newly-discovered documentary sources relating to the expedition have provided important clues regarding Spanish-Native relations both in the Florida panhandle and southern Alabama. This paper presents preliminary analysis and insights from these documentary sources.

The recent discovery and archaeological investigation of the 1559-1561 settlement of Tristán de Luna on Pensacola Bay, in concert with ongoing nearby excavations at the second and third Emanuel Point shipwrecks from Luna’s colonial fleet, has prompted new opportunities for research into the material culture of Spain’s mid-sixteenth-century New World empire. In an effort to develop systemic linkages between the material traces left behind in different archaeological contexts, both terrestrial and maritime, and the amply-documented material culture of the many different types of people and activities that formed part of mid-sixteenth-century Spanish culture, a wide range of documentary sources is being consulted for both qualitative and quantitative data, including estate papers, ship manifests, warehouse accounts, and notarial records from both Spain and the New World. This paper outlines investigative strategies and techniques being employed, and presents preliminary results and promising avenues for ongoing research.

Following the fortuitous 2015 discovery of a substantial assemblage of mid-16th-century Spanish ceramics in a residential neighborhood overlooking the Emanuel Point shipwrecks in Pensacola Bay, the University of West Florida Archaeology Institute worked with more than 120 landowners to conduct extensive archaeological testing across a broad area in order to bound and explore the site. This paper compares documentary and archaeological evidence to confirm the identification of the roughly 10-hectare site as Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561 settlement, making it the largest mid-16th-century Spanish colonial site in the Southeast, and the earliest multi-year European settlement in the entire United States.

The 1559-1561 expedition of Tristán de Luna was the largest and most well-financed Spanish attempt to colonize southeastern North America up to that time. Had it succeeded, New Spain would have expanded to include a settled terrestrial route from the northern Gulf of Mexico to the lower Atlantic coast. While a hurricane left most of the fleet and the colony’s food stores on the bottom of Pensacola Bay just five weeks after arrival, the colonists nonetheless struggled to survive over the next two years, supported by multiple maritime relief expeditions as well as a temporary relocation into central Alabama and the dispatch of a military detachment as far north as the Appalachian foothills. Though Luna’s Pensacola Bay settlement was ultimately abandoned, the documentary record of the expedition details both its maritime and terrestrial dimensions, and provides an important window into the mid-16th-century Spanish colonial world.

Despite the fact that archaeological ceramics have long been viewed as a proxy for ethno-political identity, recent research exploring the precise relationship between ceramics and identity during the historic-era southeastern United States provides increasing support for the conclusion that geographic variability in archaeological ceramics is best viewed through the lens of practice, and that archaeological phases correspond better to communities of practice than communities of identity. When viewed through the lens of practice theory and social learning theory, it becomes clear that the coexistence of both communities of practice and communities of identity within the same social landscape does not guarantee automatic correspondence between the two realms, nor even does any demonstrated correspondence necessarily prove a causal link between a community of practice and a community of identity that happen to be coterminous. Each type of community must be studied independently using appropriate and available data, and only by first disentangling the two can any demonstrable connection between communities of practice (such as archaeological phases) and communities of identity (such as historically-documented polities or ethnies) be established empirically. Only then can the exact reasons for any congruence (or lack thereof) be explored in a systematic and rigorous manner.

The recent discovery of a substantial assemblage of mid-16th-century Spanish artifacts at a terrestrial archaeological site within view of two of Tristán de Luna’s wrecked colonial ships in Pensacola Bay, Florida, has led to the identification of this site as Luna’s long-lost colonial settlement, occupied continuously between August 1559 and August 1561. Initial archaeological fieldwork was carried out by the University of West Florida during November 2015, and subsequent laboratory analysis of the extensive collection recovered has also expanded to include re-analysis of collections from 1986 UWF fieldwork in the vicinity.1 While analysis is still ongoing and far from complete, we can now assert with confidence that not only do the mid-16th-century Spanish colonial artifacts at the site match expectations in terms of types, quantities, and proportions, but also cover a broad enough area on a landform that is fully consistent with available documentary accounts of the Luna settlement. In this brief paper, I will provide a preliminary descriptive overview of the artifact assemblage that we now believe to be associated with the first multi-year European settlement in the continental United States.

Sixteenth-century Spanish artifacts are uncommon but widespread finds in the Southeastern United States, and documented assemblages have been variously used by archaeologists either as secondary indicators of the presence of passing Spanish explorers, or also as evidence of direct or indirect Spanish trade. The vast majority of such artifacts are found as grave goods within Native American villages or burial sites, apart from a handful of well-documented Spanish colonial settlements and encampments. Archaeological investigations at the recently-discovered 1559-1561 Tristán de Luna settlement provide a remarkable opportunity to examine a substantial though short-lived residential Spanish assemblage dating to this same era.