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. There's something quietly moving about a simple, undecorated pot outlasting a mission built to last centuries, surviving four hundred years underground while the community and building around it eventually disappeared entirely.
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