Windover Archaeological Site - Discovery and Excavation

Discovery and Excavation

The site was discovered in 1982 when work began on building a road across the pond in a new housing development, Windover Farms. A backhoe operator noticed several skulls in the bucket of his machine. The sheriff and medical examiner determined that the burials were not recent. The developers, Jack Eckerd and Jim Swann, halted construction at the pond and called in archaeologists. Radiocarbon dating on two bones excavated from the pond by the backhoe, paid for by the developers, yielded dates of 7,210 years and 7,320 years Before Present, establishing the importance of the find. The developers changed their development plans in order to leave the pond intact and donated $60,000 worth of pumping equipment to drain the pond for excavation.

Funding to excavate the pond was acquired in 1984. The buried bones were 6 feet (1.8 m) or deeper beneath the surface of the peat at the bottom of the pond, under 3 to 10 feet (3.0 m) of water. Researchers used a network of 160 wells around the pond to lower the water table enough to permit excavation of the peat. The workers used shovels and hand tools to remove the peat until the level of the burials was reached. One of the lead archaeologists compared excavating the peat to trying to dig chocolate mousse under water. Only half of the pond was excavated, with the remainder left undisturbed for future investigation.