The question of how 8,000-year-old human soft tissue survived beneath a Florida pond — and what it revealed about the people who were buried there — is the story of a discovery that changed what archaeologists thought they knew about the lives of early Indigenous communities in the Americas.

Human Bone In The Construction Spoil

Steve Vanderjagt was working at Windover Farms in Titusville, roughly halfway between Walt Disney World and Cape Canaveral.

The development was the project of Jack Eckerd, the son of the famous drugstore chain founder, and his stepson Jim Swann, who had built a small restaurant called the Roost on the property to help attract buyers to the area.

The morning in 1982 when the skull appeared in the backhoe bucket was not the beginning of a carefully planned archaeological project.