What archaeological evidence has been proposed for the location of San Miguel de Gualdape and how has it been linked to the 1526 expedition?

1. The documentary scaffolding that drives archaeological hypotheses

The search for San Miguel de Gualdape begins with contradictory sixteenth‑century chronicles and later pilot accounts that place Ayllón’s fleet at a bay called the Jordan (widely equated with the Santee/Winyah Bay) and then at a river named Gualdape where the settlement was established, a narrative that narrows candidate coasts but leaves direction and distance vague, which has forced historians to build competing geographic reconstructions used to guide fieldwork ^{[1] [4] [3]}.

2. Winyah Bay / Santee / Pee Dee: the classical candidate

Many histories and recent syntheses place the expedition’s first landfall at or near Winyah Bay and propose that the colony lay along the Pee Dee or nearby riverine reaches; proponents such as Paul E. Hoffman have used navigational readings of primary sources and toponymy to favor this sector, and the Pee Dee/Winyah hypothesis remains central because it aligns with the “Jordan” landing noted in early accounts ^{[1] [3] [4]}.

3. Sapelo Sound / Sapelo Island: the southward reconstruction

A cohort of modern American scholars argues the settlement was farther south—near Sapelo Sound or Sapelo Island in present‑day Georgia—interpreting the chronicles to indicate a southwest movement from Winyah and citing ethnographic names (Guale) and coastal travel estimates to support Sapelo as the likeliest site, a view now common in many secondary summaries though still lacking material confirmation ^{[5] [6] [7] [8]}.

4. The Savannah River thesis and northern/remote alternatives

Alternative reconstructions reach as far as the Savannah River; Douglas T. Peck argued in 2001 that “Gualdape” better matches a “great river” such as the Savannah and that its size would have constituted an overland barrier noted in the sources, while still other older claims—cited from seventeenth‑century pilots—have pushed the settlement northward to the Chesapeake/James River region, illustrating how the same texts can be marshaled to very different maps ^{[1] [9] [4]}.

5. What archaeology has actually found (and not found)

Fieldwork to date has failed to produce unambiguous sixteenth‑century Spanish artifacts attributable to Ayllón’s colony: James L. Michie’s 1991 surface survey near Hobcaw/Holy City on Winyah Bay recovered predominantly eighteenth‑century material and no diagnostic sixteenth‑century Spanish colonial assemblage, and multiple overviews repeatedly conclude that archaeological attempts have been unsuccessful in locating the colony ^{[10] [2] [3] [1]}.

6. Why absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—yet matters

The lack of definitive finds leaves the identification reliant on circumstantial matches between text and landscape, and that reliance can embed implicit agendas—regional pride, tourism narratives, and the desire to claim “firsts” in U.S. history—which can push scholars or popular sites toward more assertive claims; cautious voices therefore emphasize that only in‑situ sixteenth‑century Spanish material or continuous stratified deposits can settle the debate ^{[2] [3] [5]}.

7. A useful contrast: archaeology can locate contemporaneous Spanish sites

The recent discovery of securely dated sixteenth‑century Spanish materials at other Gulf‑Atlantic colonial sites (for example, the Luna settlement work cited by University of West Florida archaeologists) shows that archaeology is capable of finding early colonial deposits when preservation and context cooperate, underscoring that San Miguel’s elusiveness so far likely reflects a combination of poor preservation, shifting geomorphology, and the inherently vague documentary record rather than impossibility ^[11].

Conclusion: current state of evidence and what would change it

The body of reporting and archaeological surveys shows multiple plausible coastal candidates—Winyah/Pee Dee, Sapelo Sound, Savannah River—but no archaeological signature that can be confidently tied to Ayllón’s 1526 colony, so the link between site proposals and the expedition remains inferential and contested; a discovery of stratified sixteenth‑century Spanish artifacts or structural remains on any candidate shore would be the decisive evidence scholars say is required to end the dispute ^{[10] [2] [3]}.