The material can be conserved — stabilized, stored, treated — but it cannot be returned to the state in which it was preserved.

Leaving half the pond untouched was, in part, a recognition of this irreversibility.

Once opened, the site cannot be unopened.

Future researchers who want to ask questions that current methods cannot address need unexcavated material to work with.

The reserve exists for them.

It also exists, in some sense, for the people buried there.

Half of the Windover cemetery remains in the pond where it was placed, undisturbed, in the peat that has held it for 8,000 years.

The community that placed those burials in the pond could not have anticipated anything about what eventually happened — not the housing development, not the backhoe, not the three seasons of excavation, not the publications and the exhibits and the documentary films.