11-27-2007, 02:25 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: York, UK
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|  Archaeologists Explore Wreck Off Fla.
Quote:
PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — When Matthew Kuehne dives to the sandy bottom of Pensacola Bay, he reaches back 450 years to Spaniard Don Tristan de Luna's hurricane-doomed effort to form the first colony in the present-day United States.
Archaeologists say the buried hull of a ship from de Luna's fleet of 11 ships holds crucial clues to the 1559 expedition, which sailed from Mexico to Florida's Panhandle.
The ship's discovery was announced in October after lead sheeting and pottery from the wreck site were matched to the de Luna expedition. Another ship in the fleet was found nearby in 1992.
Kuehne, a University of West Florida archaeology student, has retrieved some ship artifacts from a barge anchored in the Gulf of Mexico about a half-mile off the coast.
He imagines what de Luna and his men would think of his modern-day exploration.
"I don't know if they would be honored that we are out here digging up their stuff or if they would be embarrassed that their technology, their efforts at colonization, failed," he said.
Had the colonization succeeded, the Panhandle settlement would have predated St. Augustine, the oldest Spanish colony in modern-day America, by five years........
| http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j...7De5wD8T5U3480 |
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