Thomas St. Myer

tstmyer@pnj.com

Ten months ago at the T.T. Wentworth Jr. Museum, University of West Florida President Judy Bense announced the first European settlement in the United States existed in what is now a suburban neighborhood off Pensacola Bay.

Perhaps lost in the hubbub of that monumental announcement was that the site clued UWF archaeologists in on where to search for the four undiscovered shipwrecks from the fleet that brought Don Tristan de Luna to Pensacola in 1559.

Luna sites galvanize public archaeology

Bense returned to the same museum Friday morning to announce the UWF archaeology program discovered a shipwreck buried under sand in a mere 7 feet of water. Summer field school students and staff discovered Emanuel Point III June 20 when scuba divers' probes felt stones under the sandy bottom of the bay.

“We had period artifacts that afternoon from the site,” said Greg Cook, assistant professor of anthropology and principal investigator of the 2006 EP II shipwreck. “I told my students it shouldn’t be that easy.”

The UWF team discovered ballast stones, iron concretions, an articulated hull of the ship with frames and hull planking, and remnants of ceramics carried on the ship. Graduate student Stew Hood, one of the field school directors, recalled divers coming back up to surface with artifacts in their hands.

MEET THE TEAM THAT DISCOVERED THE WRECK

"We started throwing gear together to try to get in the water, because we all wanted to see what it was," Hood said. "It was fantastic."

Cook described the discovery as a team effort. Each of the students and staff played a role from diving to surveying with magnetometers. Divers searched the EP III spot after a magnetometer detected a magnetic anomaly in an area of the bay twice as close to shore as the previous two shipwrecks.

Cook put excavating the Luna terrestrial site and three shipwrecks into historical perspective.

“Finding one wreck like this could cap your career. That’s an amazing thing,” he said. “I was just looking at the number of ships from this time period that are either Spanish or Portuguese found in the New World, and it’s only like 12, so there’s only a handful of sites. The fact that we have multiple vessels and the land site, now we’re getting this broader picture of the entire settlement and the entire expedition.”

The Spaniard Luna and about 1,500 soldiers, colonists, slaves and Aztec Indians traveled in 11 ships from Veracruz, Mexico to Pensacola. A hurricane struck Pensacola about a month later, sinking six ships into the bay and wiping out a significant portion of their supplies.

UWF students dive into Luna's history

Three shipwrecks still remain undiscovered in the bay, but the UWF team possibly found another one, or even all three, based on a few of the magnetic anomalies detected this summer. UWF students excavated the bay for 11 weeks as part of study in which they divided into two groups and rotated between the marine and terrestrial sites.

(Story continues below photos)

“Another target near EP II is a real promising area,” said John Bratten, chair and associate professor of anthropology and co-principal investigator of EP II. “… It appears we’re in the right area to possibly find all six of them.”

A decade passed between the EP II and EP III discoveries. The 2006 UWF field school group brought EP II to light in the final week of the study. Archaeologists from the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research discovered the first shipwreck in 1992.

Bratten said the discovery of EP III in shallower water and about 200 meters closer to shore perhaps indicates it was a smaller vessel than the previous two and possibly one of the earliest ships built in the New World.

Pieces to Luna site puzzle coming together

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit for the UWF team to conduct test excavations through March 2017 to determine the extent of the shipwreck and the type of wood used to build the ship.

“We hope it is la Salvadora, which was built in the New World,” said renowned 16th century Spanish historian John Worth, UWF associate professor of anthropology and principal investigator of the Luna land settlement. “We’ll take the wood sample soon and see what it’s made out of. Is it a New World species or Old World species? If it turned out to be that particular one that would be really exciting, because that would be the earliest ship built in the New World that’s documented.”

A Florida Division of Historical Resources’ special category grant for $290,000 funded part of the excavation. The matching grant awarded to UWF in 2014 provided funding for faculty, staff and students to conduct fieldwork, laboratory analysis, artifact conservation and curation, archival research in Spain and public outreach for two years. UWF will apply for similar grants in the future to fund further excavations.

Research, luck combine for epic discovery

“We’ve only opened up a very small portion of the ship, so we’re only seeing a limb of the forest,” Cook said. “We want to try to delimit the site. That’s the first thing you’re going to try and do through probing or remote sensing. We’ll probably do a bit more excavation on it. We still have a massive amount of material opened on the Emanuel Point II site.”

UWF archaeologists will be busy sorting through and analyzing artifacts collected this summer by students and staff. Worth described the terrestrial and marine discoveries as an amazing new wealth of information. He predicted the settlement will be a multi-generational project and that artifacts from the site will continue to be analyzed long after he retires.

Worth tells his students that an archaeologist is more like Sherlock Holmes than Indiana Jones. Archaeologists answer historical questions by discovering clues. The third shipwreck is the newest piece to the puzzle as the UWF team searches for answers to a nearly 500-year-old mystery.

“Archaeologists rarely get this amazing amount of information about a single event or a single thing, because not only do we have the land site and a large part of the fleet, but we have this voluminous documentary record and even more importantly UWF has the entire team we need to do a really good job with it,” Worth said. “That’s an amazing thing to me. It’s like it was fated to happen.”

ONLINE VIDEO

Watch University of West Florida archaeologists excavate the Emanuel Point III shipwreck at pnj.com.

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