It was remarkable, and it was scientifically significant.

But the most important finding was the full picture: an Early Archaic Florida community, glimpsed through the fragmentary but irreplaceable evidence that the peat preserved, in greater detail than any comparable community anywhere in the Americas.

The people buried at Windover were not waiting to become a scientific curiosity.

They were members of a community whose dead were placed carefully into a pond, and the conditions of that pond happened to preserve traces of their lives far beyond anything they could have imagined, for people who arrived thousands of years later asking questions they could not have conceived.

What the pond preserved was not just biological material.