Thanks Bodleian_Girl.
Posted on 02/17/2016 12:40:01 PM PST by Bodleian_Girl
Amateur archaeologist Tom Garner had time to kill and took a drive along Pensacola Bay in the Florida Panhandle. Spying a newly cleared lot, he poked about, hoping to find artifacts from the city's rich history dating back centuries to the Spanish explorers.
Garner stumbled upon some shards of 16th Spanish pottery.
"There it was, artifacts from the 16th century lying on the ground," said Garner, a history buff whose discovery has made him a celebrity in archaeological circles.
Experts have confirmed the find as the site of the long-lost land settlement of a doomed 1559 Spanish expedition to the Gulf Coast led by Tristan de Luna. The discovery bolsters Pensacola's claim as the first European settlement in the modern-day United States, six years before the Spanish reached St. Augustine on Florida's Atlantic seaboard. The expedition was scuttled by a hurricane in September 1559, shortly after the fleet arrived in Pensacola. Five ships sank.
(Excerpt) Read more at al.com ...
My uncle built houses in the Panama City Fl. area in the 50s and 60s. Specifically he built a lot of them in the Lynn Haven area, which is near a bay. There were a lot of small and even medium sized pieces of indian pottery scattered around on the ground and a few inches under the ground in small mounds of earth. People pretty much ignored them back then.
I remember playing in the woods near one of his houses and finding pieces on the ground covered in leaves and tossing them away. We referred to them as indian pottery, never thought they could have been Spanish. The bay had oysters as well as a lot of mullet and other fish. It was a good area for a camp for certain.
Wow!!! GPS sure has improved. Now you can get lost and not have to carry that much weight!
feel sorry for whoever owns the lot. they are so screwed.
It's your job to take it from there.
Thanks Bodleian_Girl.
They are 100 AD and one of them, the one with the diadem on it, is scarce.
WOW! How cool is THAT!???
Wouldn’t you just love to be the person holding a construction loan on that land? /s
It doesn't get any better than that.
“It really is amazing how so many people are “in the box” to the extent that they can walk buy an extraordinary historical find, and never see it.”
And then there are people who see things that aren’t there:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/humor/a/barbie_doll.htm
Interesting!
There is a place on Dauphin Island with what seems to be millions of shards of pottery. The Sea Lab folks used to take visiting groups of students to the spot and let them forage at will.
Wow!
The local idiots declared it an archeological site and stopped all further development stopping what would have been a multimillion dollar jobs creation.
Really?
Oh for heaven snakes.
Keep it, it’s really a gift from God.
bookmark for later
I like it!
A “newly cleared lot” means that construction was likely to begin there soon. Whatever the project, it has just come to a screeching halt.
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