The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #171928   Message #4225536
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
12-Jul-25 - 11:47 AM
Thread Name: Armchair Archaeologist (via Google Earth) pt 2
Subject: RE: Armchair Archaeologist (via Google Earth) pt 2
On Facebook today there was a blurb about the Windover Archeological site in Florida; if I've heard of it before I've forgotten a pretty interesting story. I went looking for more robust sources than Facebook.

Wikipedia

(Might be US only unless you have VPN) PBS: Florida Frontiers, The Windover people

Atlas Obscura: Bog Bodies Lay Hidden in a Florida Pond for More than 7,000 Years

NOVA (PBS); America's Bog People

From the NOVA site:
When most of us think of bog bodies, we think of northwestern Europe—Ireland, say, or Denmark. But North America has its peat bogs, too, and some of them contain the remarkably well-preserved remains of ancient people. One site in particular stands out as America's premier bog-body site: Windover.

Since its discovery in 1982, this small, peat-bottomed pond situated roughly between Cape Canaveral and Disney World in east-central Florida has offered up no fewer than 168 burials. Unlike their European counterparts, these long-dead individuals have no skin remaining; they are skeletons. But they are otherwise so well-preserved that, when unearthed, over half of them still contained brains—brains that once held the thoughts and emotions of a prehistoric people.

The remains, together with artifacts that look like they were deposited yesterday such as bone tools, a bottle gourd, and woven fabric shrouds, offer a rare portrait of life in an ancient hunter-gatherer-fisher community. And ancient it is: radiocarbon dating has placed the burials in an 1,100-year window centered on about 6280 B.C. That's over 3,500 years before the Pyramids were built (and thousands of years older than most European bog bodies). In 1986, when its full significance was coming to light—for one thing, it's the largest collection of skeletal material of this antiquity in North America—Windover was named a National Historic Landmark.