Hernando De Soto’s route through Florida is as elusive to modern archaeologists as the gold the famed Spanish explorer sought throughout the southeastern United States. Ever since De Soto’s 600 men set foot on the shores of Tampa Bay, arriving from Cuba almost 500 years ago, historians have debated the exact direction of his failed treasure-hunting expeditions as far north as Tennessee and North Carolina. But in north Marion County, an archaeologist has found what his contemporaries deem rarer than the gold De Soto was seeking — physical evidence of the explorer’s precise journey through Marion County and enough information to redraw Florida De Soto maps and fuel many more archaeological digs based on his findings.
“It gets rid of the guesswork now on the route through Marion County,” said Ashley White, a local archaeologist who found the site. “Now, we know for sure he came up through the Black Sink Prairie to Orange Lake and looped around through Micanopy.” From the De Soto site, which sits on the one-time Indian town known as Potano, De Soto eventually marched to Utinamocharra in present-day Gainesville and later to Tallahassee for the winter.
Archaeologists who study Spain’s settlement of Florida and De Soto’s exploration into the southeastern United States, regard White’s find as priceless and have little doubt as to the site’s authenticity.
“I looked at the archaeological evidence. There is absolutely no doubt that is a De Soto contact site, and I am 99.99 percent sure this is the town of Potano, the major Indian town,” said Jerald Milanich, the author of multiple books about De Soto’s expedition and curator emeritus in archaeology of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida.
“Until now, we really had no one location until all the way up to Tallahassee. Now we have a midway place.” White’s initial discovery was less a product of painstaking exploration than dumb luck.
Historians before White had dug thousands of pits into Florida’s backwoods and sifted tons of dirt in hopes of finding artifacts linked to the explorer, without success. The only confirmed De Soto site in Florida is in Tallahassee, where De Soto’s men wintered for five months.
White himself had walked his family’s property for two years looking for remnants of what he thought was a 17th century Spanish cattle ranch. He found little more than Indian artifacts.
That changed in 2005, after a series of hurricanes and storms inundated 700-acre property owned by his wife, Michele White, a bioarchaeologist.
“There is a lot of drainage (on the ranch) … and all this sand broke loose and we had artifacts just lying on top of the ground,” Ashley White said.
One was a coin minted before De Soto’s 1539 expedition. It was in a clump of pines near Black Sink Prairie.
At the time, however, White’s attention was riveted on the remains of a 16th century structure he discovered a couple of hundred yards away.
That structure turned out to be the mission of San Buenaventura de Potano, which was established some years after De Soto came through. There, White’s family found copper coins of the era and brown streaks from what remained of the posts that anchored the church. It was enough to make him put the other site on the back burner.
“I looked at the archaeological evidence. There is absolutely no doubt that is a De Soto contact site, and I am 99.99 percent sure this is the town of Potano, the major Indian town,” said Jerald Milanich, the author of multiple books about De Soto’s expedition and curator emeritus in archaeology of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida.
“Until now, we really had no one location until all the way up to Tallahassee. Now we have a midway place.”
White didn’t know it at the time, but the first site was what other historians had been looking for: physical evidence of De Soto’s exploration.
White didn’t know it at the time, but the first site was what other historians had been looking for: physical evidence of De Soto’s exploration.
Meanwhile, the second site yielded its own archaeological treasure trove — about 100 medieval coins, the largest cache from that era in North America.
“Still, the original thought was that it was a Spanish ranch outpost, and that was our hypothesis for probably two years of the work here,” White said. “(The De Soto) trail, it’s not the first thing on your mind in Central Florida archaeology.”
White’s hypothesis began to change as he examined the scant remains of the building and nearby artifacts and realized they shared similar architectural characteristics with other Florida mission buildings along Indian trails. Among those artifacts were colorful, handmade glass beads from the late 16th century, coins, pieces of pottery and nails.
Gifford Waters, historical archaeology collections manager of the Florida Museum of Natural History and an expert on Spanish missions, said finding the mission remains so close to the De Soto site reinforces the legitimacy of White’s discovery.
Missionaries would have used De Soto’s records to establish their churches along Indian trails and towns, Waters said.
“This (the De Soto site) is an extremely important site, historically and archaeologically,” he said.
With some more archaeology, the White site “will be accepted as strongly as the Martin site in Tallahassee,” Waters said. “It helps us to learn more about the Spanish expedition, but also more about the Indians.”
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