The protocols for responding to such accidental discoveries, for stopping work and calling in specialists and negotiating the competing interests of development, science, and descendant community, will determine how much of this material is recovered before it is destroyed.

Windover was recovered because a developer was willing to stop.

That willingness — which was neither legally required nor economically rational — made everything else possible.

The People Of The Pond

They did not have a name for themselves that has survived.

Whatever they called their group, their community, their specific collective identity — that name is gone.

Gone with the language they spoke, gone with the narratives they told about themselves and their world, gone with all the things that cannot survive in the material record even when the peat preserves the bones and the fabric and the tissue in the skulls.

What survived is the record of their care.