A clay pot sat underground for about 400 years, and when archaeology students in Florida pulled it out this spring, it was still intact.
Students from the University of Florida found the rare vessel at the site of the former Mission San Francisco de Potano in northwest Gainesville. Archaeologists say it was likely made by a member of the Potano Indigenous community roughly 400 years ago.
The bowl-shaped vessel has a smooth, gray surface and a simple rim that flares slightly outward. It survived centuries of pressure and shifting sediment without breaking.
“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.”
The pot was unearthed by students taking an archaeology field course taught by Waters and Charles Cobb, curator of historical archaeology at the museum. The museum is on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville.
The site was home to a large Potano village starting in 1585. In 1606, when Florida was under Spanish rule, the Spanish government established a Catholic mission there and sent a lone friar to live among the Potano people at what became known as Mission San Francisco de Potano.
Archaeologists say the mission was a doctrina, a large mission with a resident friar. The Spanish commonly established doctrinas in large Native American villages and then tried to convert the group’s chief.
The mission was one of 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.
Mission San Francisco de Potano was briefly abandoned in 1656 after the Timucua people launched a rebellion against Spanish colonial rule. The Spanish later reestablished it, but the site was abandoned for good in 1706 after English raiders destroyed it.
Artifacts from the site began resurfacing in the 1950s, and modern excavations have been underway since 2006. Researchers have recovered more than 7,000 items, including Indigenous pottery, bells, religious pendants, glass beads, stone tools, nails, and animal bones.
In 2006, archaeologists also found large Spanish-built wooden posts and clay footings that may have been used to stabilize them. Researchers think the posts were 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’s Sarah L. Stewart 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 do not know exactly what the building was used for. Based on nearby gun components, they think it may have been a barrack for Spanish soldiers sent to the site in the early 1700s.
Archaeologists said the vessel was made in a style unfamiliar to them. It probably was not used for cooking over a fire because it does not have charcoal residue, though researchers did notice faint scorch marks that may have come from placing it near a fire to warm food. They also said the marks could have come from the firing process used to harden the clay.
Many questions remain, including why the pot was discarded. “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.
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