If Windover were known only through its stone tools — if the organic material had not survived — it would appear to be an unremarkable Early Archaic site with a modest and undistinguished assemblage.

Nothing in the stone alone would suggest the textile tradition, the social complexity, or the mortuary practice that the organic material reveals.

Every Early Archaic site in the Americas where the stone record is similarly modest is potentially a site with an organic record of comparable richness.

We simply cannot know, because the organic record is gone.

The sites where organic material did survive — Windover in Florida, various waterlogged sites in the Pacific Northwest, dry-cave sites in the arid Southwest, a handful of other exceptional contexts — give us partial windows into what the full record might contain.

Those windows collectively suggest that the picture built from stone alone is severely incomplete.