Abstract
Spanish inroads into North America targeted early the land that is now Florida, with sixteenth-century explorations and seventeenth-century missions. In northwest Florida, between the major settlements of St. Marks/San Luis (today, Tallahassee) and Pensacola, the little-known Fort San José, near the modern town of Port St. Joe, was an outpost and rest stop along the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Fort San José was originally and briefly occupied in 1701 and reoccupied from 1719 to 1721. New research on this fort is possible because a large collection of materials and data has just become available for professional study. We document its position as a way station between the larger centers and a home for petty tyrants, soldiers, convicts, prostitutes, Indians (from both Mexico and the southeastern USA), and probably smugglers. Though today the archeological site is mostly an empty, beautiful white sugar sand beach, in the early eighteenth century here, Fort San José was a small but significant player in the wider spheres of international conflicts and politics.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Port St. Joe’s historian–archeologists, Herman Jones and Wayne Childers, as well as the St. Joseph Bay State Buffer Preserve for their major contributions to this research.
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Saccente, J., White, N. (2015). Fort San José, a Remote Spanish Outpost in Northwest Florida, 1700–1721. In: Funari, P., Senatore, M. (eds) Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08069-7_16
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