New clues

Despite relentless heat over the past days in the field (a local thermometer measured over 94 degrees this afternoon, and there was little cloud cover or breezes), we are making great progress in expanding our map grid and laying in new shovel tests closer and closer to the bluff edge overlooking the river floodplain. Students have been working hard and honing their new skills in excavation, sifting, and mapping, not to mention equipment maintenance and repair along the way.

Today we made a very promising discovery in a shovel test located in a level area near the edge of the bluff. Not only did we find half a dozen Native American potsherds, several of which display characteristics consistent with 18th-century Apalachee Indian pottery known from previous Spanish presidio excavations near Pensacola, but in the same unit we found not one but two tiny white glass seed beads, commonly found as trade goods on sites of this period. While these finds are not definitive evidence that we are entering the outskirts of the San Joseph de Escambe mission village, they certainly give us hope that we are moving in the right direction. Tomorrow and over the course of the next few days, we should be able to open up a number of additional testpits in this area, providing a larger sample that may help confirm the age and identity of these early finds.

Patience is a virtue in archaeology

Archaeology can often be long days of finding very little, and the field school students are learning this first hand. We did make some more progress today, finding one piece of alkaline glazed stoneware in one of our shovel tests. Even with unproductive shovel tests, however, we're gradually gathering the data we need to put together a picture of where people lived and discarded their trash at many different times in the past alongside the river, and with a little luck, we'll find evidence for the Escambe mission site among all the other occupation periods.

Mostly the crew battled intense heat, humidity, and sun today, and one of the crews worked their way towards the river, while having to brave thick vegetation, spiders and bugs, and high water since the river is still up.

While most of our site is relatively open, as you move towards the river-bottom, the brush gets quite a bit thicker as you can see in this video!

We are also very grateful today for the portable restroom generously provided by Boyett's for our field school...from the students and staff, thanks very much!

Picking up speed and finding some clues

Today was a great day for the colonial frontiers field school. It was a beautiful day with hardly a cloud in the sky and the students were energetic after the weekend. We've picked up the pace already this week by completing three shovel tests today, most of which were outside of the worst of the soil disturbances caused by a train derailment years ago.

We also found the first indication of the Native American population we're looking for in the form of a small piece of eroded sand tempered pottery. It could be from any one of several time periods, including the Apalachee of the Spanish era, so we'll have to wait until we find comparable examples with some kind of surface decorations to know more.

So far, all our undisturbed shovel tests lack any evidence of a plowzone, which suggests that much of this location may never have been farmed, accounting for the general lack of surface finds over the years. The good news is that if and when we locate the buried remains of Native American or Spanish structures or activity areas, their state of preservation may be far better than normal.

Another couple of pieces of brown salt-glazed stoneware were found today on the surface near the river, matching others we found in surface collections overlooking the river last week, so we are pushing the shovel test lines towards the river over the next couple of days looking for some sort of definitive signature of our lost Spanish mission.

What a difference a day of rain makes

After yesterday's rainout we were eager to get back to the site, however the site we came back to looked little like the site we had left on Wednesday morning. Lets just say things were wet; very, very wet!







In spite of intermittent rain showers, we did manage to finish up two of the shovel tests.

One shovel test was capped by the same fill as several of the other shovel tests, but under the fill, the original soil was intact, and the students found a tiny piece of whiteware or pearlware while digging through soil

which was far less than ideal (in fact it had the consistency of half-melted ice cream). They were good sports about it, however.

Though we have yet to uncover any further evidence of the mission so far, the field school students are definitely getting their first taste of practical archaeology: being wet, hot and muddy!

Rain day

Today was a very short day, due to the line of rainstorms that moved in off the Gulf and reached our site by mid-morning. We've now got teams working on four shovel tests, including the feature identified yesterday (so far no conclusions as to what it is). But we had to cover the units and run for the vehicles today, so we're hoping for better weather tomorrow.

The archaeologists have arrived

The Colonial Frontiers Project officially kicked off yesterday with the arrival of nine first-time field school students. The day started with some general maintenance and further establishment of the grid.

We started out putting three shovel tests in the ground relatively close to our datum point. These shovel tests were located predominantly in or near fill which was brought in following a railroad derailment in the area during the 1990s. This meant that one of the shovel tests was completely fill dirt, while another was highly disturbed, though it appears that there may be some intact deposits located under the fill.

Despite this, the day did bring us the first possible evidence of the earliest European settlements in the area. In the moderately disturbed shovel test, we recovered a piece of Brown Salt Glazed Stoneware which dates to the 18th century. Since its production pre-dates 1775, it is either our first indication of the initial British Period plantation activity in this stretch of the Escambia River, or possibly the first evidence for the First Spanish mission community we are searching for.



In another shovel test to the north we found our first feature at the end of day one. We documented it and will be excavating it today. Also found in this test pit were some fragments of free-blown olive green glass, also possibly from the colonial period. All these are tantalizing signs of the missing chapters of early colonial history in this region, but much more work remains.

Field School begins tomorrow

The Pensacola Colonial Frontiers project will shift into high gear tomorrow with the first day of fieldwork with our full complement of students. The graduate supervisors and staff spent Friday setting up the project mapping grid and establishing benchmarks for horizontal and vertical control, and excavated the first shovel test on the site. We confirmed that at least part of the survey area may never have been plowed, which will be a real plus if we are able to find intact remains of structures or activity areas from the colonial era, or any other period for that matter. After months and months of historical research, the search for the 18th-century missions outside Spanish Pensacola is finally moving into the archaeological phase.