PENSACOLA, FLORIDA—Newly recovered artifacts from a privately owned site near Pensacola Bay are from the Spanish settlement led by explorer Tristán de Luna y Arellano from 1559 to 1561, according to researchers from the University of West Florida (UWF). A hurricane struck the settlement one month after the 1,500 colonists arrived, however. Two years later, the survivors left on Spanish rescue ships from Mexico and returned to Spain. Pensacola native Tom Garner, who had attended UWF and studied with archaeology, collected artifacts from the surface of the site and took them to the UWF archaeology lab last October. “What we saw in front of us in the lab that day was an amazing assemblage of mid-sixteenth-century Spanish colonial period artifacts. These items were very specific to this time period. The University conducted field work at this site in the mid-1980s, as have other since then, but no one had ever found diagnostics of the sort that Tom found on the surface. People have looked for this site for a long time,” UWF archaeologist John Worth said in a press release. Test excavations have uncovered additional artifacts. For more on Tristán de Luna, go to "Sunken Dreams."