California’s Enduring Mystery: The Drake Landing Site Controversy Revisited

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Trace element X-ray florescence analysis is applied to ceramics from sixteenth-century shipwrecks in order to help resolve the enduring mystery of the location of Sir Francis Drake’s brief landing on the west coast in 1579. The landing site has been debated for decades. Was it California, Oregon, or Washington? Various sites have been proposed and each has its die-hard promoters. The most recent publication concerning the landing site, which has Drake bypass California altogether, is problematic as it gives credence to conspiracy theories. This paper presents a sober examination of the controversy and presents a comparative study of ceramics from Pt. Reyes, California, thought to have been part of Drake’s plundered cargo of Chinese porcelains, which he abandoned ashore. These are compared to ceramics from other contemporary sites. The objective has been to determine whether a unique chemical signature can be used to distinguish cargoes. The Pt. Reyes site is complicated by the presence of a Spanish shipwreck occurring less than 20 years later carrying a similar cargo.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37026.0