Before Jamestown, Before Plymouth
Archaeology and written records reveal Spanish Florida — the nation’s first colonial experiment.
In her sixth book, archaeologist Judith Bense paints a vivid picture of Spanish Florida from 1513 until 1763. Written explicitly for non-academics who are curious about the state’s history and archaeology, it includes more than 150 illustrations and draws on the latest research on this surprising chapter in Florida’s story. Early Spanish Florida: Unearthing the History of America’s Oldest Colony, published by University Press of Florida (UPF) and Florida Humanities, is available through UPF and bookstores nationwide. The following is the book’s introduction.
Many people think that Florida’s history began in the late 1800s when the railroads and hotels from the Northeast reached Florida’s east coast. Others think it began with the land booms of the 1920s or with World War II. However, Native Floridians, the first Floridians, had lived in Florida for over 12,000 years before the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s. Florida has the oldest recorded history in the United States. By the time Jamestown was founded in 1607, a third generation of Euro-Americans was already growing up in St. Augustine, founded in 1565. When the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth in 1620, St. Augustine was due for urban renewal. It was a town with a fort, church, seminary, hospital, fish market, and about 120 shops and houses. Florida had the first explorations, colonization attempts, settlements, conversions to Christianity, churches, enslaved people, mixed-race marriages, and much more. We also have shipwrecks from this Early Spanish era, including three ships of a 1559 Spanish fleet that sank in Pensacola Bay.
We will begin the story of Early Spanish Florida with the arrival of Ponce de León, who thought the landmass was an island when he claimed it for Spain, in 1513, and we will end it when the Spanish lost Florida to the British in 1763. There are many surprises in the Early Spanish occupation of Florida.
For starters, the first capital was on Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1566, and (on paper at least) the province of La Florida included almost all of what is now the Southeastern United States. But by 1763, the occupied area of Spanish Florida had shrunk to only two small areas around St. Augustine and Pensacola.
This book is an illustrated synopsis of what happened in Early Spanish Florida based on what we now know from historians and archaeologists. The story is not a particularly pretty story. It was a classic clash of cultures: well-armed invaders at first literally waged war on resident Native Americans and tried to take them and their land by force. Five hundred years ago, that is how Europeans fought each other. In the Americas, the Spanish military had superior weapons of metal, armored soldiers on huge war horses, and attacking war dogs; with those advantages, they thought they could defeat any Native American force. The truth is that while the Spanish armies won many battles against the Native people, they lost the war and were driven out of the Native homelands.
This story of early Spanish Florida is organized by time. Each chapter reflects a distinct period during which the Spanish tried different methods and approaches to settle and hold on to their colonial province. It starts with the Spaniards who first found Florida while raiding to capture Indians to sell to their colonists in the Caribbean as slave laborers. We will discover that, initially, Spanish Florida included the entire Southeast, and we will follow the first Spanish military campaigns as they explored the region, waging war on the Native Americans in their path. When the Spanish realized they could not conquer Florida’s Indigenous people, they pivoted to a peaceful approach toward Native people and traditional colonialism. After that failed, the Spanish turned to using religious conversion and a mission system to pacify and suppress the Indians. When this approach also failed… Spain’s European rivals, France and Britain, swooped in and took almost all the Southeast. With little Spanish resistance, the French and British reduced Spanish Florida to the area around St. Augustine and the peninsula. The Spaniards’ last attempt to keep their rivals from taking more land was to fortify and occupy Pensacola Bay, the only deepwater port on the northern Gulf. But this was too little too late, and though West Florida successfully held the line, Spain finally lost its entire Florida colony to Britain in 1763 in a treaty ending a European war. I have been a historical archaeologist specializing in the Early Spanish period for more than thirty years. When I started my research, I focused on West Florida because little was known of what occurred there during the first Spanish occupation. We have learned that what happened there was both different and similar to what happened in East Florida, and the military colonists there had quite unusual experiences. Just as it is today, West Florida was different from the rest of Florida, and the experiences of the people there provide the “rest of the story” of Early Spanish Florida.
Our Florida is a land of swaying palms, beachfront condos, interstates, and entertainment destinations. But five centuries ago, other people lived here, [people] whose ancestors had their own cultures, religions, and ways of life. They hunted, fished, and farmed, living in villages, towns, and rural hamlets. This book [tells] the story of how new people with a different culture—Spanish Europeans—arrived and, over the next two and a half centuries, instigated changes that transformed both the Natives and Spaniards forever. This is the most intriguing and least understood time of Florida’s 300 years as a European colony. It is the very beginning, and it shaped what would become “our” Florida.
A key reason why we know so much about Early Spanish Florida is that the Spanish were incredible recordkeepers. They usually wrote in triplicate, sending copies of reports, letters, military orders, inventories, shipping documents, and much more to the Spanish colonial government in Seville and the colonial administrative centers of Mexico City and Havana.
Historians have long studied the meticulous documents from Early Spanish Florida preserved in archives. Over the past two centuries, they have written scores of books and other publications. Historians caution us to remember that the writers of historical documents (priests, military officers, designated scribes, clerks, accountants) had personal and professional agendas behind what they wrote. In other words, the writers of documents about early Florida began with a bias. They were only writing their interpretations of what they saw, and the documents were intended for their superiors, who often had never been to Florida. As we know today, multiple eyewitnesses can have quite different and even conflicting accounts of past events. We also must remember that only a small sample of the existing Spanish documents have been found and studied.
Archaeologists also have their biases. For example, it is only in the last few decades that there has been a strong interest in the archaeology of Spanish Florida. On the other hand, British and early American sites such as Jamestown, Mount Vernon, and Williamsburg have long drawn a great deal of archaeological interest and research, and much is known about how people lived in the British colonies. This British bias resulted in a paucity of knowledge about Spanish Florida archaeology and the people who lived here in the past. But much has changed in the last 60 years.
A relatively new branch of research, historical archaeology, has developed, which combines both the written and unwritten records of people in the past. It blends what people wrote about what they witnessed, thought, and did (history) with the materials left behind from what they did (archaeology). This partnership has produced a more accurate and robust picture of what happened in the past than those studies that use only one source of information. [My latest book, Early Spanish Florida: Unearthing the History of America’s Oldest Colony] brings together information from scores of research projects that used history, archaeology, geography, cartography, shipwrecks, climatology, chemistry, and many other fields to understand Early Spanish Florida.
All the people living in Spanish Florida adjusted and adapted during the 250 years. They would be shocked that their struggling former colony is now a flourishing state of the United States, with over 22 million people, 27% of whom have some Spanish heritage, and where today, Spanish is considered a second language.
The story of what happened so long ago in Florida is fascinating, and much more is known today than ever.
Images (other than the map on page 29) and text from Early Spanish Florida: Unearthing the History of America’s Oldest Colony by Judith Bense. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, March 2026. Reprinted with permission of University Press of Florida.
