The communities who left those stone tools may have also woven complex fabrics, carved wooden objects, constructed fiber containers, and possessed a material culture that the normal taphonomic processes of their burial environments simply erased.

Windover demonstrated that this was possible.

It did not prove that every Early Archaic site had textile traditions at Windover’s level of sophistication.

But it demonstrated that the absence of textile evidence in the standard record is an absence of preservation, not an absence of practice.

The Individual Lives Behind The Aggregate Data

The quantitative picture of Windover — 168 individuals, 91 with preserved brain tissue, various ages and sexes represented, average statures of this or that measurement — is the language of scientific publication and is entirely appropriate in that context.

But individual lives lie behind those numbers.