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

The pot was unearthed by University of Florida students this spring. Kristen Grace / Florida Museum of Natural History

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.

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.

“It’s very unique,” Gifford Waters, historical archaeology collections manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, says in a statement announcing the find. “Typically, we find things that were broken and discarded.”

Archaeologists say it’s rare to find fully intact pots like this. Gifford Waters

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

Starting in 1585, the site was home to a large village inhabited by the Potano people, an Indigenous subgroup 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.

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’s chief.

In this type of community, for the friar, “it was a very difficult life,” Michael Gannon, a historian who worked on earlier digs at the site, told the Gainesville Sun’s Sarah L. Stewart in 2006.

The vessel was crafted in a style unfamiliar to archaeologists. Kristen Grace / Florida Museum of Natural History

The Mission San Francisco de Potano was just one of the many Spanish missions established along el camino real, or “the royal road,” an east-west route used in the 16th and 17th centuries.

“In 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,” according to the Florida Division of Historical Resources.

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 re-established the mission a few years later. The site was abandoned for good in 1706, when it was destroyed by English raiders.

The students are enrolled in an archaeology fieldwork class. Brooke Bowser / Florida Museum of Natural History

For centuries, Mission San Francisco de Potano was largely lost to history—until artifacts began resurfacing in the 1950s. Modern excavations have been underway since 2006.

Since then, researchers have recovered more than 7,000 items and counting. Most of what they’ve unearthed has been Indigenous pottery, but they’ve also discovered bells, religious pendants, 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.

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’s church or school or the friar’s house.

“It’s one of the very few sites that I’ve ever worked on that there aren’t any modern disturbances,” Waters told the Gainesville Sun in 2006. “Out here, as far as we can tell, there’s been nothing.”

The newly discovered pot was found inside a Spanish-made structure, though archaeologists don’t 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.

The vessel itself was crafted in a style unfamiliar to archaeologists. It probably wasn’t used for cooking over a fire, because it doesn’t 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.

Many other questions remain unanswered. Chief among them: Why was the pot discarded centuries ago?

“You don’t leave things behind that you can still use, so why was this purposefully put into a pit?” Waters says in the statement.

• More about:
• American Indian History
• Archaeology
• Colonialism
• Florida
• History
• Indigenous Peoples
• Spain