Florida Students Unearth a Perfectly Intact 400-Year-Old Indigenous Pot

University of Florida students excavating a 17th-century mission site in Gainesville have uncovered a roughly 400-year-old Indigenous clay pot, completely intact — the first unbroken pottery vessel that Florida Museum of Natural History collections manager Gifford Waters says he has helped excavate from a site on land, rather than a shipwreck, in his career.

The small, hand-shaped vessel, compact enough to fit in a palm, has a simple rim and a smooth, dull gray surface with no decoration. It was found at Mission San Francisco de Potano, established in 1606 after the Potano people, part of the Timucua, relocated to the area in 1585 following pressure from Spanish forces. The mission was abandoned in 1706, and its remains lay hidden until artifacts began surfacing in the 1950s.

The pot was found inside a Spanish-made structure whose purpose is still unclear; a gun's rear sight and a musket side plate found nearby suggest it may have served as a barrack for a small military garrison stationed there after British attacks on missions increased in the early 1700s. Unlike cooking vessels, which typically retain traces of burned food and charcoal, this pot shows no such residue, suggesting it likely was not used for cooking over a fire.

More than 7,000 artifacts have been recovered from the site since 2006, most of them fragments of Native American pottery, along with glass beads, stone tools, nails and animal bones from meals that included turtle, freshwater fish and turkey. Students also recently found fragments of a second, larger, rougher vessel that does not match established local pottery traditions, which researchers say may have arrived through trade with communities in St. Augustine or present-day Jacksonville, or with a new resident who brought different pottery traditions to the settlement.