When the county coroner made the determination that the remains were ancient, he was making a practical and informed judgment, not an archaeological one.

But the judgment was right.

When radiocarbon dating was eventually applied to bone and to peat collected from the burial matrix, the results confirmed ages in the range of 7,790 to 8,290 years before present for the early sample — figures from the Nature paper published in 1986 by Doran and his colleagues.

That places the Windover burials in the Early to Middle Archaic period of Florida prehistory, thousands of years before agriculture, thousands of years before ceramics, thousands of years before the construction of any structure that would be recognized as a monument or a temple.

These were hunter-gatherers of the Florida peninsula.