Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
There are numerous Spanish wells in Florida and around the country including but not limited to those on the Treasure Coast. A very old well that supplied fresh water to passing ships was on Key Biscayne. You could still see the evidence of that one back just a few decades ago and possibly still today. It was not far from the lighthouse.
You probably know of the wells that were found several decades ago at Frederick Douglass as well as others such as the one near the McLarty Museum.
While they vary in depth and construction, the area surrounding wells, as you would expect, is a good place to find artifacts. Of course, many have been filled in and overgrown. There can be other clues to the existing of any old well. I once found the remains of an old well while metal detecting in the Caribbean. Old military artifacts surrounded the area including buttons, musket parts, and more. It was on a hillside and used to catch spring water, so it was different than most Florida wells.
The illustration at the top of this post shows an illustration of a barrel well. Here are a couple excerpts from the same article.
Wells are common in St. Augustine (Deagan 1981; 1983:57, 111). They were constructed by digging a large well construction pit into which a stack of wooden barrels was placed to form a well roughly a meter in diameter (Fig. 2). A typical well included a stack of one or two barrels extending about 4 m below ground level and 2 m below the water table. Wells are routinely found 12 to15 m from the street edge toward the back of each lot (Deagan1983:247). Frequently a number of well construction pits, wells, and false starts are located within a few meters of each other, sometimes overlapping one another...
The earliest well was constructed in the fall of 1565 when Pedro Menendez de Aviles first established the colony at what is known as the Fountain of Youth Park site (FOY), but the tradition of constructing barrel wells continued into the Second Spanish Period (Table 2)...
The article is THE WELLS OF SPANISH FLORIDA: USING TAPHONOMYTO IDENTIFY SITE HISTORY by Elizabeth J. Reitz.
Here is the link.
The study attempted to learn from animal remains found in the well.
Wells from Spanish Florida provide a wealth of information about subsistence in the colony. Archaeologists working with materials from the Spanish colony argue that these wells were filled quickly. It is possible, however, that they were filled slowly. Wells left open after being abandoned, like natural pitfall haps, should accumulate the remains of animals such as rodents, snakes, and frogs, which become entrapped in such features. Wells filled quickly once abandoned should contain few of these animals. While two Spanish wells have been found that did function as natural traps, most of the wells of St. Augustine and Santa Elena do not appear to have been open and unused long enough to serve as natural traps...
The straps of barrels used in barrel wells can possibly be detected by the right metal detector.
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Concerning the barrel wells found at the Fountain of Youth...
There are several natural springs in the area, but once the fortification wall was constructed across the north boundary of the camp the Spanish needed access to clean water without the risk of venturing outside of the safe area. To do this, they created wells by digging holes and stacking three to five barrels on top of each other to keep the soft sand from collapsing back into the well shaft.
The barrel wells at the Fountain of Youth had several 16th-century artifacts in them, including an almost complete olive jar that may have been used to gather water. The discovery of these wells helped to establish this area as the landing spot for the Spanish settlers...
Here is that link.
Archaeology of the Menéndez Encampment Historical Marker
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Science is helping researchers judge books by their covers — and revealing surprising beneficiaries of medieval trading routes in the process.
Dozens of rare, fur-covered volumes from 12th and 13th century French monasteries are wrapped with seal skins that may have come from as far away as Greenland, researchers report April 9 in Royal Society Open Science. The findings challenge the assumption that the books’ makers used only locally sourced materials and suggest that they were part of an extensive trade network...
Here is the link for more about that.
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