The implications extended beyond Florida.

If Early Archaic Florida communities had this level of social and technological complexity — a complexity visible only because of the extraordinary preservation at Windover — then Early Archaic communities elsewhere in the Eastern United States, and throughout the Americas, may have had comparable complexity that was simply not preserved.

The Windover evidence was not an argument that this specific community was unusual; it was an argument that the standard picture of all Early Archaic communities was based on an incomplete record.

Every period of North American prehistory before the development of ceramics and more durable material culture is potentially subject to the same kind of systematic underrepresentation.