Archaeologists look for artifacts at DeSoto’s camp
By the time John Smith met Pocahontas in Virginia, Europeans had already come to the Florida Panhandle and left.
But the conquistador Hernando de Soto and his men — the first tourists to visit Florida for the winter — left behind remnants of their time on a hilltop that is now almost in the shadow of the state Capitol.
While Americans this week celebrate the birth of the nation, and while historians this year mark the 400th anniversary of the English settlement of Jamestown, archaeologists in Florida continue to sift through a site where Europeans hunkered down much earlier.
From October of 1539 to March of 1540, more than 60 years before the English settled Jamestown, de Soto and about 600 Spanish soldiers seized the town of Anhaica from the Apalachee Indians. They moved in for the winter before resuming their search for riches in gold they’d heard could be found in the New World.Historians have long known from journals of de Soto’s men that they spent the winter somewhere in the Tallahassee area, but they didn’t know exactly where until the 1980s, when a state archaeologist asked some developers for permission to survey an area they were planning to turn into an office complex. The archaeologist, Calvin Jones, was looking for signs of a Spanish mission from the more recent past.