Students excavate 450-year-old ship

PENSACOLA, Fla., June 30 (UPI) -- Layers of sand helped preserve a 450-year-old shipwreck being excavated this summer in Florida's Pensacola Bay, an archaeologist said.

The Emanuel Point II, sitting under just 12 feet of water, was part of the fleet commanded by Pensacola's founder, Don Tristan de Luna, said John Bratten, who heads the anthropology and archaeology departments at the University of West Florida.

Twenty UWF students are conducting the excavation, which so far has turned up a stone cannon ball, part of a green ceramic dish and a chicken bone, The Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal reported Tuesday.

"This helps us get a better understanding of the people who came here to start a colony -- what they brought and what they ate," Bratten said. "It also helps fill in the gaps that the historical record doesn't tell us."

A covering of sand protected the ship and its contents from oxygen, bacteria and tidal erosion, Bratten said.

The ship, found in 2006 and identified in 2007, is about 42 feet long -- about half the size of its sister ship, the Emanuel Point I, found in the bay in 1992.