A 400-year-old Native American pot lay buried beneath a Spanish mission in Florida

University of Florida students have unearthed a nearly 400-year-old clay pot at the site of a 17th-century Spanish mission in Gainesville, and remarkably, it survived completely intact. The pot was likely made by a member of the Indigenous Potano Timucua tribe while the mission was still active, and its discovery is considered highly unusual since buried pottery this old is almost always found broken or in pieces by the time archaeologists reach it. The find was made during a hands-on field course led by archaeologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History, at a site known as Mission San Francisco de Potano, which has been under excavation since 2006 and has already yielded more than 7,000 artefacts.How the intact pot was found at Mission San Francisco de PotanoAccording to the University of Florida's archaeology field school programme, students take part in weekly excavation sessions during the spring semester, working in small marked plots across a wooded site in northwest Gainesville. The course is led by Gifford Waters, who manages the museum's historical archaeology collections, alongside Charles Cobb, curator of historical archaeology at the Florida Museum. Students use th...