The pond holds what it holds.

The road was never built.

Why The Standard Record Fails Us — And What To Do About It

The methodological lesson of Windover is one that archaeologists continue to grapple with, because it applies not just to the Early Archaic of Florida but to the entirety of pre-ceramic American prehistory.

The problem is called taphonomic bias — the systematic distortion of the archaeological record produced by the differential survival of different types of material.

Some things survive better than others.