Had it been discovered a decade later, after NAGPRA and the more complex legal and ethical environment it created, the excavation would have faced different and more constraining requirements.

Windover landed in the moment it landed.

The result is an archive that could not have been produced at any other time.

This is not a comfortable thought.

It implies that the extraordinary knowledge generated by the Windover excavations was partially a product of the specific legal and ethical environment of the mid-1980s — an environment in which the excavation of ancient Native American cemeteries was possible in ways that it would not be today.

Glen Doran himself has acknowledged this, noting that Windover may be the last large cemetery excavation of its kind in American archaeology.