Founded in 1565, St. Augustine became the center of power in La Florida during the First Spanish Period. Although the Spanish made earlier attempts to claim the region, San Agustin was the only settlement to endure for over 450 years, earning it the moniker of the “Nation’s Oldest City.” Moved to its current location in 1572, the town was first illustrated in 1586 by Baptista Boazio’s depiction of Sir Francis Drake’s raid on the colony. Over the decades that followed, the community was marred by additional pirate attacks, plagues, hurricanes, and fires while simultaneously expanding the Spanish dominion into the interior southeast. Given the city’s prominence, it has been the subject of archaeological investigations for nearly 100 years. Using research conducted by the City of St. Augustine Archaeology Program, this paper synthesizes data at a city-wide level using new technologies to illuminate unheralded histories about the town’s first 135 years.

At the time of European colonization, the Spanish Crown sponsored expeditions, colonies, missions, and military footholds across what is now the American Southeast. The recent identification of San Antón de Carlos (1566-1569) on Mound Key, Florida, provides an opportunity to explore the diverse nature of these colonial entanglements and their methodological challenges. Here we present a preliminary assessment of a Spanish house inside the fort at San Antón. We discuss the issues of evaluating this house assemblage in the context of the subsequent reoccupation by the Calusa people but also a short lived second mission attempt by Franciscans in the late 1600s. We use the insights of our case study to discuss the nature of Spanish-Calusa interactions and its potential to understand life on the Spanish frontier within the Calusa heartland.

From 1566 to 1568, Captain Juan Pardo founded a network of six small garrisons across the modern-day Carolinas and across the Appalachian Mountains into eastern Tennessee. The first of these, Fort San Juan, was built at the Native town of Joara as the base of operations for Spain’s imperial designs in the interior of northern La Florida. Yet the subsequent destruction of all six forts during an Indigenous uprising brought these ambitions to an unexpected end. Although short-lived, Pardo’s forts constitute the earliest Spanish presidio system in the Western Hemisphere. Two decades of research at the Berry site in North Carolina have revealed the location of Fort San Juan and the context of its construction, use, and annihilation. Here we discuss this work in reference to the architecture of Fort San Juan and the compound that housed its garrison, discussing how these reflect Spanish and Native interests at Joara.

Apalachee Province, an area located between the Aucilla and Ochlockonee Rivers in northwest Florida, was the last major mission effort by the Spanish government and the Franciscan order in La Florida (1633-1704). At the height of the Apalachee Mission period, at least fourteen missions were functioning. Epidemic disease, slave raiding, Native disaffection, inattention from distant colonial officials, repartimiento labor requirements, international competition, and Queen Anne’s War account for its demise along with the wholesale collapse of the mission provinces beyond St. Augustine. This paper examines the mission system in Apalachee Province and Spain’s approach to the Indigenous populations of Florida in the seventeenth century, the factors that brought this extensive mission system to its end, and the archaeological investigations that have broadened our understanding of this little-known period.

San Luis was one of the most important Spanish missions in Apalachee Province, the region between the Aucilla and Ochlockonee Rivers, during the Mission Period (1633-1704). San Luis de Talimali (8LE4), the mission's second location (1656-1704), was purchased by the state of Florida in 1983 and historical and archaeological research of the site continues to the present. San Luis is unique in that beyond a large number of Apalachees, it was also home to Spanish friars, soldiers, administrators, and civilians. Decades of research has given us at least a partial window into its town plan. Gastroliths, presumably from chickens, are a sometimes overlooked artifact with the potential to reveal more information about that plan and foodways in general. Gastrolith distribution in one specific portion of the village, the religious complex, offers yet another line of evidence for the identification of buildings within the complex.

Mission San Francisco de Potano was founded by the Franciscan Fray Martín Prieto in 1606 in the principal town of the Potano-Timucua in north Florida. The mission became the headquarters of the Spanish missions to the Western Timucua and the base for missionization of the Apalachee region to the west. In 2024 the Florida Museum of Natural History conducted a field school at the site which included a systematic site-wide metal detector survey along with test excavations at targeted loci believed to represent areas of Spanish architecture and activities and in the surrounding Native American village area. Artifacts recovered in the metal detecting survey include wrought iron nails and spikes, as well as more unusual finds such as bell fragments, religious medallions, cut copper-alloy sheeting, and a brass tinkler. Excavations revealed a large Native American pit feature, multiple post holes, and potential evidence of two Spanish structures at the site.

Long neglected by the Spanish colonial government, the Gulf Coast of Texas became a flashpoint for French and Spanish colonial ambitions with the Sieur de La Salle’s establishment of his colony in Matagorda Bay in 1685. Excavations by the Texas Historical Commission from 1995-2002, recovered millions of artifacts from the French shipwreck La Belle (41MG86) and the Keeran Site (41VT4) – a high bluff overlooking Garcitas Creek where both La Salle’s 1685-1689 settlement Fort St. Louis and the 1721-1726 Spanish Presidio La Bahia were located. In this paper, the analysis of the recovered artifacts and their spatial distributions form the interpretive foundation for a critical reexamination of the materiality of these early French and Spanish colonial populations in Texas.

The first Spanish attempt to settle on Pensacola Bay was by Tristan de Luna in 1559-1561, but it was unsuccessful. The Spanish then focused their attention and resources on the Atlantic seaboard until the French intrusion down Mississippi and started settlements on the Gulf coast. Alarmed about the danger to their silver mines and loss of deep-water Pensacola Bay, the Spanish knew a new presidio was needed to protect that bay, but it was just too far (400 miles) from St. Augustine to be supported from there. Consequently, the new presidio was made part of the Windward Fleet patrolling the Caribbean and Gulf headquartered in Veracruz. As a result, the West Florida presidio community was quite different from Presidio San Agustín. This paper compares the differences and similarities between the presidio communities and the unusual historical and archaeological circumstances that distinguish Spanish West Florida between 1698 and 1763.

Discovered in the 1980s and designated as an archaeological site in 1992, the Santa Rosa Island Shipwreck underwent extensive investigation by the University of West Florida (UWF). Initial surveys suggested an Iberian origin, with hull construction using mahogany and Spanish cedar. From 1998 to 2002, UWF field schools excavated and documented the site, uncovering artifacts and structural elements indicative of a large colonial vessel. Analysis dated the wreck to between 1680 and 1720, aligning with characteristics of 18th-century Spanish ships. Further research identified the vessel as likely the Nuestra Señora del Rosario y Santiago Apostol, a Spanish frigate lost in a 1705 hurricane.

The Spanish established four presidios across West Florida between 1698 and 1763. These fortified settlements were adapted to a variety of environmental, cultural, and political conditions. The final settlement, Presidio San Miguel de Panzacola, began officially circa 1756 after Presidio Isla de Santa Rosa was destroyed by a hurricane in 1752. San Miguel, situated on the mainland, had been established as a warehouse, blockhouse, and mission after a 1740 hurricane, and by 1756 was the Spanish residential and administrative center. The Spanish fortified the central part of the settlement in 1757 due to threats of Indian attack. The location of San Miguel continued to be fortified throughout the colonial period, surrounded by a grid of British and later Second Spanish streets and houses. Modern Pensacola obscures much of the colonial settlement, but UWF archaeologists often recover elements of the settlement’s history during construction in Pensacola’s city streets and lots.

Diverse approaches to commensality influenced the local production and colonial consumption of Indigenous serving vessels. In the Southeast U.S., analysis of vessel form and function indicates that Indigenous commensality tended toward communal-style eating. Those practices contrasted with the individual-style plates, bowls, and cups used by Spanish colonists and Indigenous people in Mexico at the colonial center of New Spain. An ongoing study of ceramics from the West Florida presidios (1698-1763) suggests that a broad perspective on comparative commensality has important implications for explaining the varied colonial consumption of Indigenous ceramics and the appearance of colonoware in Spanish Florida. In this paper, I extend this investigation to the Tristán de Luna settlement (1559-1561), the earliest multi-year European settlement in the continental U.S. This preliminary study provides a glimpse at the early colonial incorporation of Indigenous vessel forms along the Florida frontier within a broad comparative perspective.