Organic materials — wood, plant fiber, leather, hide, plant foods, textiles, rope, nets, baskets, wooden implements — are the majority of what most human communities make and use.

In most archaeological contexts, they disappear.

What survives is the stone, occasionally the ceramics where they were used, sometimes the bone where soil conditions are favorable.

This survival bias has shaped the discipline’s understanding of the past in fundamental ways.

Periods and places where organic preservation is poor — including most of the warm, humid regions of the Americas — are reconstructed from a stone-tool-heavy record that systematically misrepresents the technological and material complexity of the communities who inhabited them.

Windover demonstrated, in the most dramatic possible way, what the invisible organic fraction of the archaeological record might actually contain.