A new project is featuring the history of St. Augustine through a modern-day digital medium.
More than one million artifacts and records, held by the Florida Museum of Natural History, are now available for public viewing through a new online database called iDigStAug.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the digital window into America’s oldest city, completed under the direction of Kathleen Deagan and the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board, spotlights archaeological discoveries along with the city’s colonial history.
Gifford Waters, collection manager for historical archaeology at the museum, described the large online collection as a viewing platform for researchers and the general public.
Waters underscored the collection process as a long one.
“The records don’t always match up in terms of how things were mapped and measured,” he said in a news release. “So, we have to go back and reanalyze all of these collections, looking at the measurements, counts, weights and descriptions of every single artifact.”
Currently, iDigStAug includes data from three colonial houses — about 51,000 artifacts — a small fraction of the long-term plan to include nearly the entire St. Augustine collection, spanning everything from indigenous-made beads to a trove of British contraband found in the ruins of a harbormaster’s house.
iDigStAug includes data from three colonial houses — about 51,000 artifacts — a small fraction of the long-term plan to include nearly the entire St. Augustine collection, spanning everything from Indigenous-made beads to British contraband.
Each entry includes a historical summary of the site, archaeological reports, photographs, field notes, slides and diagrams that show how the original structures were laid out.
“We’ve scanned and digitized the field records, maps and analysis cards and uploaded them as archival PDFs that are freely available to researchers and the general public,” Waters said.
The website also features high-resolution, hand-drawn maps of colonial St. Augustine. Users can search by category of artifact or data type, filter for beads, Spanish pottery, Native American ceramics and more.
Educators are already working with the Florida Public Archaeology Network to build classroom resources around the collection.
The audience will be privy to following St. Augustine’s history, which is marked by frequent upheaval and destruction. Founded by the Spanish in 1565, the city saw relocation, pirate raids, fires, hurricanes and military sieges during its early years.
Bringing the large collection of artifacts online presented challenges because of inconsistencies in decades-old excavation methods.
St. Augustine moved from the mainland to Anastasia Island less than a year after its founding because of conflict with the indigenous Timucua. St. Augustine moved again in 1572, was burned by pirates in 1586, flooded in 1599 and destroyed by British settlers in 1702. The 20th century brought new threats, as urban development endangered many of the city’s historic sites.
In 1959, Florida established the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board to acquire and restore remaining colonial-era structures. The board partnered with archaeologists, historians and architectural historians to excavate sites and rebuild lost buildings for nearly four decades before its disbandment in 1997.
Much of the Florida Museum’s current historical archaeology collection was gathered during this period. However, bringing the collection online has posed challenges because of inconsistencies in decades-old excavation methods.
iDigStAug and its sister site, the Comparative Mission Archaeology Portal, were both developed in partnership with the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at Monticello. Both databases are intended to support research and public education, allowing wider audiences to access and explore Florida’s colonial heritage.
For more information, go to https://idigstaug.ufarch.org.
This story was created by reporter Lucia Viti, lviti@usatodayco.com. with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at cm.usatoday.com/ethical-conduct.
This article originally appeared on St. Augustine Record: St. Augustine’s history now online with iDigStAug
