It was only when serious excavation began in 1984 that the full extent of the site started to emerge.

Windover Pond is approximately half an acre in surface area — small enough that you could walk around its perimeter in a few minutes.

Its maximum depth during the excavations was perhaps two meters of water.

Beneath the water was peat: the accumulated organic sediment of thousands of years of plant growth and decomposition, layers of compressed organic material that in this specific environment had created the chemical conditions that would make Windover one of the most extraordinary wet archaeological sites ever excavated in North America.

The people had been buried in that peat, or placed at the pond’s margins to be incorporated into it.