It requires either accident — a backhoe hitting something unexpected — or deliberate archaeological investigation to reveal itself.

What makes the Windover pond different from the thousands of similar ponds across the Florida landscape is not what is visible.

It is what is preserved beneath the surface.

The peat environment that happened to exist there, in that specific combination of waterlogging and chemistry, maintained the biological and material archive of a community for 8,000 years while comparable material everywhere else in Florida disappeared.

The community that used this pond was almost certainly not the only Early Archaic community in central Florida.