They are scientifically invaluable.

They are also the remains of people who were buried with care by a community that had its own understanding of what should happen to the dead.

The tension between scientific value and the claims of the dead and their cultural successors is not resolved by acknowledging it, but acknowledging it honestly is the beginning of the right approach.

Doran himself, in multiple accounts of the Windover project, has noted that Windover may be one of the last large cemetery excavations of this kind that American archaeology undertakes — that the changing legal and ethical environment, represented most clearly by NAGPRA, makes future excavations of similar scope and character significantly less likely.

If he is right, then Windover occupies a unique position: it is both a scientific treasure of the first order and the product of a form of archaeological practice that the discipline is moving away from.