These are the oldest surviving woven textiles from the New World.

Not the oldest evidence that textiles existed — impressions of fabric in clay and other indirect evidence suggest textile production considerably earlier than Windover — but the oldest actual surviving woven fabric that can be physically held and analyzed.

The 87 fragments represent a preservation miracle that no deliberate archival effort could have produced.

The significance of this find goes beyond the simple age record.

Before Windover, the prevailing understanding of Early Archaic technology in the eastern United States emphasized stone tools and assumed that the organic technologies of these periods — the clothing, the containers, the cordage, the nets, the baskets — were simply lost to the normal processes of decomposition.