Some 400 years ago, a member of the Indigenous Potano-Timucua tribe scooped up some clay and carefully molded it into a modest vessel, small enough to rest in the palm of their hand.
You can imagine their fingers pressing a tight crease around the pot’s simple rim and smoothing its dull grey surface, leaving it free of any adornment.
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We may never know exactly what the pot held or how many hands it passed through before it was excavated, still fully intact, by students at the University of Florida earlier this year.
“It’s very unique. Typically, we find things that were broken and discarded,” said Gifford Waters, collections manager for historical archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “You don’t leave things behind that you can still use, so why was this purposefully put into a pit?”
Besides his work on collections from shipwreck sites, where it is common to find complete materials, it is the first time in his career that Waters has worked alongside a crew that unearthed a fully intact pottery vessel.
Even when whole pottery is discarded, the pressure of being underground for centuries or the shifting of earth due to development and agriculture often break the vessel long before archaeologists get to it.
The students who found the pot were enrolled in a field course that Waters instructs alongside his colleague Charles Cobb, curator of historical archaeology at the museum.
Every Friday during the spring semester, students learn the fundamental skills of archaeology fieldwork while studying the centuries-old site of Mission San Francisco de Potano, located in northwest Gainesville.
Today, the shady patch of woods where the mission once stood is dotted by 1-by-1 meter (approximately 3-by-3 foot) excavation units where students trowel away soil in search of artifacts. Crisscrossing trails form in the understory as they traipse among these plots that mark the remains of a 17th-century kitchen, friar’s residence and surrounding Potano village.
In 1585, the Potano, a group of the Timucua people in North Florida, moved to the area after Spanish forces pushed them from their home, likely located between present-day Payne’s Prairie and Orange Lake.
In 1606, the Spanish government sent a friar to the Potano village to establish a mission, one of the first of more than 100 Catholic missions that would be established over the following century to help prop up Spanish rule in Florida. Mission San Francisco de Potano was eventually abandoned in 1706, and its evidence faded away, until artifacts began to turn up in the 1950s.
At its peak, the large village would have been home to a few hundred Potano people, with only a single European living at the mission as friar. So, it is unsurprising that the vast majority of the over 7,000 artifacts collected from the site since 2006 are pieces of Native American pottery. Over the years, archaeologists and students have also unearthed glass beads; stone tools; nails; and animal bones left over from meals of turtle, freshwater fish and turkey.
“What tells us the most is not just the artifacts but the evidence of activities. Knowing that we have a bunch of pieces of bone at the site is great, but the fact we know that nearly all of them came from one spot tells us it was a cooking area and trash pit,” Waters said. “It’s not just artifacts themselves but where they were on the site, how they were distributed and what they were associated with that tells the story.”
This context matters in archaeology, which is why, even after the small pot itself failed to yield many clues, it still becomes part of the broader story emerging from the site. It was found within a Spanish-made structure, although determining what the structure was used for will require more digging. Records show that a small garrison of soldiers was sent to the site after British raids on missions intensified during the early 1700s. It is possible that the structure even served as a barrack, a theory supported by the rear sight of a gun and the side plate of a musket uncovered nearby.
Based on the pot’s depth and location at the site, it was likely crafted during the century-long span of the mission. But the style of the vessel is not one the archaeologists are familiar with, and exactly what the pot was used for remains a mystery.
With cookware, archaeologists often find a coating of burned food and charcoal clinging to the interior of the artifacts. The lack of that charcoal residue suggests that this pot wasn’t placed over the fire for cooking itself. However, it might have still been used during mealtimes. The faint scorch marks may be the result of the firing process during its creation, or they could have formed by placing the pot near the fire to heat up individual portions of food.
Shortly after finding the small pot, students also unearthed broken pieces of a much larger and very different piece of pottery. Unlike the smooth pot, this one had a rough surface and a composition that doesn’t appear to follow local pottery traditions. Archaeologists suspect it may have arrived by trade with communities in St. Augustine or present-day Jacksonville, or perhaps it was brought along with a new resident with traditions of their own. People, goods and ideas all flowed through the village, leaving their mark on the artifacts buried beneath the earth.
“During the later years of this mission, folks from different parts of Florida and Native Americans from different areas moved into and around the site. It’s really neat to see these differences and connections in the artifacts,” Waters said. “It shows both the persistence and change of traditions over time.”