Law enforcement was contacted.

When the county coroner examined the remains, what he found ruled out any modern criminal investigation.

The bones were simply too different from what modern buried bone looks like.

The heavy wear on the teeth alone — the kind of abrasion that comes from a lifetime of eating food processed with stone tools, food laced with grit and sand — spoke of a very different world.

These were ancient people, the coroner determined.

Archaeological rather than forensic.

The bones were declared very old.

And the Windover pond, which was supposed to become a drainage basin for a Florida housing development, was about to become one of the most significant archaeological sites in North America.

Below that ordinary-looking water, below a layer of peat that had been accumulating for thousands of years, lay a cemetery.

It contained the remains of 168 people — men, women, children, infants, elders.

They had been buried carefully, deliberately, in positions that spoke of intention and community.

And the chemistry of the pond had done something that Florida’s warm, acidic soil almost never allows: it had preserved them.

Not just the bones.

Inside some of the skulls, something remained that had no right to still exist.