It cannot name them.

It cannot describe them.

But it can acknowledge their existence.

The Science Of Wet-Site Archaeology — A Discipline Transformed

The Windover excavation was not just a discovery of exceptional material.

It was also a demonstration of wet-site archaeological methods that influenced the broader field.

Wet-site archaeology — the excavation of sites where waterlogging has preserved organic material — had been practiced before Windover, primarily at sites in northern Europe and the Pacific Northwest of North America where cool, wet conditions had preserved material over centuries to millennia.

The European experience with bog bodies and waterlogged archaeological sites had developed a body of method and technique for working with saturated organic material.