What Windover does tell us is substantial: the physical characteristics of the people, their diet and health, the material technologies they used, the mortuary practices they followed, aspects of their social values as expressed in how they treated their vulnerable members and their dead.

This is far more than most Early Archaic archaeological sites provide, and it is enough to build a genuinely rich and humanly meaningful picture of life in the Florida interior 8,000 years ago.

The Ethics Of Excavating A Cemetery

The Windover excavation raised, explicitly and in real time, the ethical questions that accompany the archaeological investigation of any cemetery.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — NAGPRA — was passed by the United States Congress in 1990, four years after the last Windover field season and after the initial publications from the site had appeared.