The extraordinary knowledge produced by the Windover excavations was possible because the right conditions coincided at the right historical moment: an extraordinary preservation environment, a developer who was willing to stop construction, a researcher who recognized the site’s potential, a period before the most significant legal changes in the handling of Native American human remains.

The combination will not recur.

The Preservation Bias And What It Reveals About Archaeology

Windover’s deepest lesson for the discipline of archaeology is methodological rather than site-specific.

Every time archaeology reconstructs a picture of past human life from physical evidence, it is working from a survival sample — the fraction of the original material record that happened to survive the specific taphonomic conditions of each site.

The sample is always incomplete, and the incompleteness is not random: it systematically under-represents certain types of material and over-represents others.