It was evidence of people who lived with care for one another, who wove their clothing and buried their dead with attention, who inhabited a Florida landscape that no longer exists, in ways that most of the archaeological record will never be able to reveal.

Windover remains, as it has been since the excavations ended in 1986, one of the most important and most irreplaceable Early Archaic sites in the Western Hemisphere.

The half of the pond left unexcavated still holds what it held before the first backhoe arrived.

Whatever is in it — whatever the next generation of archaeologists, with tools that do not yet exist, might eventually find — will have been held there by the peat for thousands of years more.

The pond waits.