When archaeologist Deni Seymour hit something that looked like bronze during a dig in Nogales, Arizona, she thought she had stumbled upon a bell. It would have belonged to the Spanish, who were in the area in the mid-1500s alongside the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado.
But what Seymour found wasn’t a bell at all. It was the rarest artifact of her career: the oldest gun ever found in America.
The gun. To be clear, it’s a really big gun. Officially known as a cannon or a wall gun, the artifact is 3.5 feet long and weighs 40 pounds. The Spanish typically used two people to operate the weapon, which they placed on a large wooden tripod. It could fire buckshot and lead balls. To light the cannon, operators placed priming powder near the touch hole and used a match cord.
Speaking to The Washington Post, Seymour explained that the cannon was probably built in the early 1500s and then transported to America by Spanish explorers. She found it on the floor of a Spanish stone-and-adobe structure.
“An artifact like this can connect people to the past, to history, and really stirs their imagination,” she said.
Transport in a Jeep. Unfortunately, Seymour was worried that the canon might also stir the imagination of law enforcement. When she discovered the artifact, the archaeologist put it on a beige bedsheet and loaded it into the back seat of her Jeep Wrangler. The way home included passing a Border Patrol station, where she worried it might get confiscated.
“If that thing got taken,” the archaeologist said, “I might not ever see it again."
Luckily, on that day Border Patrol officials apparently saw nothing out of the ordinary in a 66-year-old archaeologist with a centuries-old canon in her car. Seymour and her co-author, William Mapoles, published their paper in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology in November.
Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition. The canon was found in a building that was part of San Geronimo III, the first European settlement in the Southwest that was founded in 1540. Researchers discovered the site in 2020.
San Geronimo III marked an important moment during Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition. The Spanish conquistador came to the U.S. from Mexico in search of the so-called Seven Golden Cities, and their respective treasures, as well as a route to Asia. Vásquez de Coronado traveled the Southwest with hundreds of soldiers, Native Americans, and slaves. They established the European settlement of San Geronimo III, which is located near the the Santa Cruz River.
Of course, they didn’t find riches or a route to Asia, and the expedition was called off. However, it was around this time that the Sobaipuri O'odham people attacked San Geronimo III. The settlement was destroyed and its inhabitants killed, with survivors fleeing to Mexico.
A gun that was never fired. Interestingly, in their paper, Seymour and Mapoles point out that there was no black residue in the barrel of the cannon, meaning that it was never fired. It also wasn’t loaded.
The researchers believe that the gun was likely never fired because the Spanish didn’t have time during the attack by the Sobaipuri O'odham people. The Spanish were taken by surprise in the attack, they noted, stating that many died in their beds.
There’s another factor to support their theory: money. According to the researchers, a weapon of that caliber was too expensive to be left behind.
Images | Deni Seymour | International Journal of Historical Archaeology
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