John E. Worth
©
UWF Archaeology Institute
The 2015 identification of Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561
terrestrial settlement on Pensacola Bay was based on substantial and
unprecedented archaeological evidence for mid-16th-century Spanish
and Aztec residential habitation across a landform that had already been long
suspected to be one of the best candidates for the site, both based on
documentary descriptions and the presence of two shipwrecks from Luna’s
colonial fleet just offshore. But this
was just the beginning of the story for UWF archaeologists, whose next
challenge was to explore the extent and nature of the archaeological deposits
at the site in greater detail. As I
described in a blog post last year, “How
large would Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561 settlement have been?,” documentary
accounts indicate that Luna’s settlement was initially sketched out to comprise
140 house lots, 40 of which were to be reserved for a plaza, church, warehouse,
and other public structures, with the remaiming 100 lots to be laid out for 100
families to remain at the port settlement once the expedition pushed north into
the interior. Projecting a 5 by 7
rectangular configuration of four-lot blocks, the initial town configuration
would have been laid out during the five weeks between arrival and the
hurricane that destroyed Luna’s fleet, and would have housed some 1,500
colonists and stranded sailors for the first six months, with only 362
remaining in the settlement a year later after several evacuations on relief
ships returning to Mexico, dwindling to less than 200 inhabitants by the spring
of 1561.
Since the site’s discovery in the fall of 2015,
archaeological survey and excavations have been conducted on an ongoing basis by
the University of West Florida Archaeology
Institute, with one of the principal goals of 2016 work focused on
“bounding” the site, or systematically determining how big of an area is
covered by the Spanish debris scatter resulting from the two-year occupation of
Santa María de Ochuse. To this end, more
than 900 shovel tests were excavated across the entire neighborhood surrounding
the initial find, each providing a 50 x 50 cm “snapshot” about a meter deep of
what artifacts were present and what the soil layers looked like in that
area. Shovel testing both within and
beyond the artifact scatter established a general boundary for the site’s
maximum extent, while simultaneously providing an important assemblage of
tightly-dated mid-16th-century artifacts that comprise the standard
“residential” material signature for the Luna expedition. The same basic assemblage of residential
debris is scattered from one end of the site to another, including numerous
sherds of assorted Spanish and Aztec ceramic vessels and wrought iron nails and
spikes, not to mention routinely-encountered fragments of basalt grinding
stones, a range of arms and armor parts such as crossbow bolt tips, lead shot
and sprue, fragments of mail, brigandine, and jack plate armor, and assorted
other personal items including copper-alloy straight pins, copper lacing
aglets, and other clothing fasteners and buckle fragments.
The results of the 2016 shovel test survey as well as the
2016 UWF summer field schools at the site, combined with subsequent laboratory
analysis of the artifacts discovered, has provided a much clearer picture of
the size and configuration of the Luna settlement site, as we reported in the
spring 2017 conference of the Florida Anthropological Society in the paper “The Discovery and
Exploration of Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561 Settlement on Pensacola Bay” (coauthored
by John E. Worth, Elizabeth D. Benchley, Janet R. Lloyd, and Jennifer Melcher,
but drawing on field and lab work undertaken by many additional staff and
students). The spatial distribution of
several categories of diagnostic Luna expedition artifacts overlap one another,
including 16th-century lead glazed redware, Columbia Plain majolica, Aztec
ceramics, and caret head nails, but the most abundant diagnostic is early
Spanish olive jar, which is distributed across a total area of roughly 12.7
hectares, or 31 acres. This includes 8.9
hectares on the level upper summit of the terrace overlooking Pensacola Bay,
with another somewhat lighter artifact scatter across 3.8 hectares extending
along the lower slope down close to the shore and surrounding a freshwater pond
draining to the west. If we overlay a
projected rectangular settlement grid based on the documentary accounts on top
of the archaeological distribution on the upper terrace (see schematic below),
the rectangle measures 375 meters by 290 meters, with a projected main site
area of roughly 11 hectares, or just over 27 acres (not counting the additional
area below the terrace, which appears to have been a secondary activity area
surrounding the freshwater spring drainage and boat landing along the lower
bluff).
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| Schematic Map of Luna Settlement Site |
Now that we have archaeological data revealing the Luna
settlement’s size to be somewhere between 12.7 and 14.8 hectares, we can
confirm that this is by far the largest mid-16th-century Spanish
residential site in the entire Southeastern United States, larger than both 16th-century
locations of St. Augustine (about 1 and 4 hectares) and the contemporaneous
location of Santa Elena in South Carolina (6 hectares). Since the Luna settlement originally housed
1,500 settlers, more than double the number of settlers living in 16th-century
St. Augustine and Santa Elena (with between 300-600 inhabitants in each), the
huge size of the archaeological site of Santa María de Ochuse is entirely consistent
with what we would expect, though its two-year duration was of course far
shorter than the later Spanish colonies to the east, leaving a somewhat lighter
trace on the landscape.
Apart from simply being a huge random scatter of Spanish
debris, or objects accumulated by local Native Americans (whose apparently
small seasonal camps at the edges of the site throughout much of prehistory are
concentrated along the bluff margins of the bay and bayou; see also the
previous blog post here),
we also now know that the site is accompanied by direct evidence of Spanish
structures, trashpits, hearths, and other activity areas. The 2017 UWF terrestrial archaeological field
school at the Luna settlement site has built upon previous fieldwork at the
site to open up even larger excavation units in search of intact evidence for Spanish
residential presence. Even though the
total area excavated between shovel tests and larger excavation units
represents only a fraction of a percent of the entire site area, examples of
all these feature types have already been found (see pictures below).
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| Profile of burned Spanish post, with inset showing olive jar sherds packed vertically along the posthole walls. |
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| Trashpit deposits in place. |
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| Spanish firepit deposits in plan view and profile (inset). |
Structural features include a deep, burned post found in
2016 with a charred post remnant and a wrought iron nail still in place and
with olive jar sherds in the posthole fill, and a second nearby post found this
year with the same depth and size (though not burned below ground like the
first one). Also this year we discovered
a straight line of three probable Luna-era postholes of equal depth within a
single 2x2 meter excavation unit. And in
2016, we excavated a large trashpit packed with 16th-century trash
such as broken barrel bands, Spanish pottery sherds, nails and spikes, wire, a
smashed Native American bowl, a few shells, and a complete deer antler. And on yet another end of the site,
mechanical stripping of topsoil in advance of house construction exposed a
firepit deposit containing Spanish olive jar sherds and a wrought iron nail
fragment amid shell and wood charcoal.
In addition to pit features, we also have good evidence for
routine on-site activities that would have been carried out by Spaniards while
living at the site. For example, several
areas have produced direct evidence of the on-site casting of lead arquebus
shot, including a number of unfinished and unfired lead balls with sprue
snipped off them with scissors (and sometimes still attached), along with a
good number of lead droplets and splatter (see below).
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| Evidence of on-site lead casting and the use of scissors. |
In sum, the broad distribution of mid-16th-century
Spanish artifacts at the Luna site are clearly a result of a large number of
Spaniards living on site, and the association of these artifacts with pit features resulting
from Spanish structures and the activities of daily life at the site is exactly
what we would expect for the short-lived occupation at Santa María de
Ochuse. Now that we have established the
site boundaries and begun a more thorough exploration of the subsurface
deposits, we look forward to continuing our exploration of this large and
important colonial site over coming years.
