The practical challenge of excavating Windover Pond deserves its own chapter in the story of the site, because wet-site archaeology is genuinely different from the kind of excavation that most people associate with archaeology.

In a conventional dry-site excavation, archaeologists remove overlying soil carefully, in controlled horizontal layers, recovering artifacts and noting their precise positions before the material is removed.

The sediment can be screened — passed through mesh of various sizes — to recover small objects and bone fragments.

The stability of the dry soil holds the positions of objects and human remains relatively fixed until the excavation reaches them.

A wet site presents entirely different challenges.