The textiles, particularly, required the kind of careful block-lifting and laboratory extraction that minimized handling of the fragile, partially decomposed fabric.

The result of this sustained, expensive, technically demanding work is the Windover archive: the skeletal collection, the organic artifact collection, the tissue samples, the environmental data, the radiocarbon dates, and the publications that have made this material available to the global scientific community.

The Organic Archive — What Was Not Found Before Windover

The standard Early Archaic archaeological record in the eastern United States consists primarily of stone tools and the features produced by the use of fire: burned rock middens, hearth remnants, charcoal.

This record is not because Early Archaic people used primarily stone and fire.