Traces of the Narváez expedition?

Photograph Nicolas Delsol, Florida Museum of Natural History

While the expedition was intact, the place where this force of some 270 men spent the most time—about six weeks—was the boat-building campsite at the so-called Bay of Horses, most likely along the St. Marks estuary. There, they constructed five of their ~40-foot boats out of wood, metal, pine pitch, and fibers, built shelters, killed and ate their remaining 17 horses, and buried their dead. All of this activity left quite a mess, and the Soto expedition, which visited the site 11 years later, saw plenty of it left: horse bones, forges, fire pits, etc. But in Florida’s subtropical climate, what could possibly remain nearly 500 years later? Possibly bits of metal slag and charcoal from the forges, fragments of native pottery they made use of, personal jewelry buried with the Spanish dead. Even if no horse bones remain by now, what about horse teeth? In the 1980s archaeologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville collected cow bones and this single horse tooth at the 16^th–century Puerto Real townsite on the north coast of Haiti (western Hispaniola). Its DNA is the earliest known from domesticated Spanish horses in the Americas. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35895670/ It also provided evidence that the wild Chincoteague ponies of Assateague Island off Maryland and Virginia are descendants of Spanish horses. https://www.kcci.com/article/centuries-old-horse-tooth-last-piece-genetic-puzzle-assateague-horses/40826170 The fact that this tooth survived burial for five centuries in the tropical climate of Haiti suggests that intact horse teeth could yet be found somewhere along the St. Marks estuary. That would be strong confirmation of the Narváez boat-building site.