It is because stone tools and fire-related features survive the taphonomic gauntlet of thousands of years in the American soil more readily than the other categories of material that these communities certainly used.

What was not found before Windover — and what remains extremely rare in the North American archaeological record — is the organic fraction.

The clothing, the baskets, the cordage, the nets, the wooden handles, the worked hide, the gourd containers, the woven mats — these are the items that modern hunter-gatherer communities use abundantly and that presumably their prehistoric counterparts also used abundantly.

They are essentially invisible in the standard archaeological record because they do not survive.