I read somewhere that an artifact was found in Georgia dating from the 16th century, which was a brass (copper?) plate engraved with a sketch of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was at the grave site of a little nine-year-old girl who evidently died while traveling (they think) from Mexico to Florida, possibly to join the Spanish colony at St. Augustine.
That is, the little girl died on the way, and her parents buried her with this little metal engraving which had her name, the dates of birth and death, I believe the sketch of a crucifix, and and a sketch of the Guadalupe image. I'm thinking it was from the 1560's.
And when was it found? I don't know.
These details are from my uncertain memory.
I have been unable to find this by googling keywords. Anybody know anything about this?
It was supposedly a key bit of physical evidence that Mexican people had a devotion to O.L. Guadalupe at the date referenced.
I’ve not heard of it. I thought that the Guadalupe image was from the 1600s. thus earlier. Wow.
Recent archaeological finds in the United States
Some Guadalupan discoveries in excavations carried out from 1880 by the archaeologists David J. Hally, Gordon Willey James V. Langf, John Belmont and others in the United States, in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, by the Anthropological Society of Washington and by the Society for American Archaeology, have made a new contribution to what we know of the history of Guadalupe and its influence from the first years of the second half of the 16th century. Certain objects came to light in these excavations that refer to Our Lady of Guadalupe and to Juan Diego. The hypothesis of these archaeologists about the provenance of these objects is the following: already at the beginning of the second half of the 16th century the Spanish organized expeditions to conquer the eastern coast of America to set up Catholic missions. One of them was established precisely between 1559 and 1561, on the site of these archaeological finds (cf. in "Columbian Consequences", vol. 2, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Border Lands East, Washington and London (1990), and in "The Recovery of Meaning", Historical Archeology in the Eastern United States, edited by Marc P. Leone and Parker V. Potter, Jr., Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, s.d. John S. Belmont, with a letter about the discoveries from Kanab, Utah, dated 25 May 2000, to Fr J. Escalada).Mo< Source