Archaeologists verify Florida’s Mound Key as location of elusive Spanish fort
by Mary-Lou Watkinson and Halle Marchese | FLORIDA MUSEUM | April 23, 2020
Conflict with the Calusa and other South Florida peoples would ultimately lead to Spanish abandonment of the region during the 16th century.
FLORIDA MUSEUM ILLUSTRATION BY MERALD CLARK
Florida and Georgia archaeologists have discovered the location of Fort San Antón de Carlos, home of one of the first Jesuit missions in North America. The Spanish fort was built in 1566 in the capital of the Calusa, the most powerful Native American tribe in the region, on present-day Mound Key in the center of Estero Bay on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Archaeologists and historians have long suspected that the fort, named for the Catholic patron saint of lost things, was located on Mound Key. Researchers have been searching for concrete evidence in the area since 2013.
“Before our work, the only information we had was from Spanish documents, which suggested that the Calusa capital was on Mound Key and that Fort San Antón de Carlos was there, too,” said William Marquardt, curator emeritus of South Florida archaeology and ethnography at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “Archaeologists and historians had visited the site and collected pottery from the surface, but until we found physical evidence of the Calusa king’s house and the fort, we could not be absolutely certain.”