For over a century, historians and archaeologists searched for Hernando de Soto’s first winter encampment. The discovery of 16th century Spanish artifacts at a construction site in downtown Tallahassee solved that mystery and renewed interest in Spanish Colonial archaeology throughout the Southeastern U.S. Distinctive artifacts from the sixteenth century entrada identified at the site have since been used to aid in the identification and interpretation of other Spanish Contact Period sites. The accumulated data from nearly 40 years of subsequent archaeological investigation have illuminated this once poorly understood chapter in North American archaeology

The route of Hernando de Soto’s entrada included central Alabama, where a 1540 battle at the Indigenous town of Mabila resulted in a catastrophic loss of supplies and morale for Soto’s army and thousands of Indigenous lives. Twenty years later, Indigenous peoples in the same region were affected by entradas from the Tristan de Luna settlement. Four years of archaeological survey have identified the Mabila province, including more than 200 sixteenth-century Indigenous farmsteads and more than 150 pieces of Spanish metal. This paper discusses the implications of these finds for the Soto and Luna expeditions and for the Indigenous people they encountered.

In 1559, the Viceroy of New Spain launched a massive royally-financed expedition from Veracruz, with the goal of establishing a colonial foothold in Southeastern North America after decades of failure. Led by don Tristán de Luna y Arellano, fleet of 12 ships carrying some 550 soldiers and nearly 1,000 additional settlers successfully established a Gulf coast settlement on Pensacola Bay. Though abandoned after only two years because of the devastation of their fleet and food stores by a hurricane shortly after arrival, Luna’s settlement nonetheless holds the potential for exploring the already-hybridized culture of mid-16^th-century New Spain. Archaeological investigations by the University of West Florida at the Luna Settlement, rediscovered in 2015, have provided an amazing portrait of New Spanish material culture, ranging from military gear to household ceramics, along with traces of wooden architecture and food debris that are revealing how the settlers adapted to life in Florida.

This presentation will focus on the most recent findings related to the maritime archaeology survey and excavation of the 1559 shipwrecks from the Luna expedition. During the past couple of summers, extensive remote sensing survey has been conducted in the area of the three known wrecks from the fleet, and most recently archaeologists have excavated intact hull and associated features of the second and third wrecks from the expedition.