The Windover collection, in this sense, is not simply an academic resource.

It is a set of responsibilities as well as an opportunity.

The Pond That Changed Florida History

It is difficult to overstate how significantly the Windover excavation changed the understanding of Florida’s prehistory.

Before Windover, the dominant picture of Early Archaic Florida was based almost entirely on stone tool assemblages and the features produced by fire.

The communities of this period were understood as mobile, technologically simple, and leaving little distinctive mark on the archaeological record beyond their stone implements.

The organic fraction of their material culture — the technologies that would have defined most of their daily lives — was simply absent from the record.