They were not excluded from the mortuary practice by their age or their declining productivity.

They were full members of the community in death as they had been in life.

Across all of these details, a picture of social values emerges that is both specific to the Windover community and recognizably human in the fullest sense.

These were people who took care of each other.

Mortuary Practice Without Invented Belief

The mortuary practice at Windover — the specific positioning of the bodies, the orientation of the heads, the fabric wrapping, the grave goods, the use of wooden stakes to anchor the burials in the peat — tells us something about how this community thought about death and about the appropriate treatment of the dead.

What it cannot tell us directly is what they believed.