Mount Royal has been a favored place for people to live for thousands of years, with archaeological evidence including a Native American burial mound, earthworks, a village area, evidence of a British plantation, and the remains of a Spanish mission occupied by the Timucus Indians. British naturalist William Bartram visited Mount Royal in 1765–1766 and again in 1774, and his published 1791 account of the large mound, fields, earthen causeways, and an artificial pond became one of the earliest accounts of an Indian mound in North America. His plan of the mound was later published in 1848 by the newly formed Smithsonian Institution. Archaeologist Clarence B. Moore excavated the mounds in 1893 and 1894 and found human burials with hammered and embossed sheet copper ornaments, polished stone tools, pearl and shell beads, and decorated ceramic vessels. The copper ornaments resemble finds from Mississippian sites in Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma and date between 1000 and 1500 A.D. Salvage excavations by archaeologist B. Calvin Jones at the village site in 1983 and 1994–1995 revealed evidence of six structures containing Spanish artifacts that were probably part of the Mission of San Antonio de Anacape, which existed from 1587 to 1675.