Florida Museum of Natural History Distinguished Research Curator Kathleen Deagan discusses research at St. Augustine, FL, where she has worked since 1976. In 1565, long before Jamestown, Spaniards, free and enslaved Africans and Native Americans crafted our country’s first enduring European settlement in St. Augustine. The site of the abandoned first settlement remained buried, lost from memory of history for more than 400 years, until archaeologists rediscovered it at what is today’s Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park.
Interview and videos produced by Peter Byatt for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Kathleen Deagan: We’re standing in the center of what was the 1565 settlement of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and his Spanish settlers. If you can imagine behind me 450 years ago, this was a Spanish village. We’d be looking at it from the waterfront. The people who came here and lived in the village were all Spanish. They came directly from Spain and there were 800 who arrived here. Only 26 of them were women. The rest were soldiers or sailors. We think that there were some children.
In addition to all the people from Spain, there were people that had been shipwrecked on Florida’s coasts over the previous 20 years. And one of Menéndez’s prime objectives was to help some of these shipwreck victims, and in fact Menendez’s son himself had been in a ship that wrecked off the Florida coast and he was hoping to find some word of his own son – which he didn’t do – but he did pick up nearly 20 people over the course of his voyages who came to live here at the community, including several people of African heritage.
They built their settlement and houses here in this large field on the edge of the water. We think that the town was organized around a central space like a plaza, and this is interesting to us because when Pedro Menéndez and his settlers arrived there was a Timucua Indian town in this area, and the Native Americans were also organized around a central plaza.
My first excavation here at the Fountain of Youth Park was in 1976. We thought we were studying a Timucua village that was in contact with the Spaniards when they first arrived. The site has been excavated by archaeologists since the 1950s and it had always been assumed that this was a Native town.
We found artifacts that were Spanish mixed with Native American but we assume that those were evidence of trade with Spaniards or adopting Spanish traits, and it wasn’t until actually the 1980s when we realized that this may actually have been the original Menéndez settlement. And that was when we found barrel wells. It’s where they got their water. Those have never been known to be used, even in a historic Native American community. And that, along with the archaeological evidence, led us to think about it in a different way and think of it as a Spanish town and so we started digging in different directions. And at that point we were able to uncover the buildings and look at the whole town plan. We found features that had very clear Spanish elements in them – the military buttons, and jewelry items for Spanish women, the child’s figa – and those things led us to uncover, bit by bit, the settlement.
Learn more about the Historical Archaeology collection at the Florida Museum
St. Augustine: America’s Ancient City online exhibit