The Windover Bog Site

Windover Bog (and sometimes known as Windover Pond) was a pond cemetery for hunter-gatherers, people who lived hunting game and gathering vegetable material between about 8120-6990 years ago. The burials were staked down in the soft mud of the pond, and over the years at least 168 people were buried there, men, women, and children. Today that pond is a peat bog, and preservation in peat bogs can be quite astonishing. While the burials at Windover were not as well preserved as those of European bog bodies, 91 of the individuals buried contained bits of brain matter still intact enough for scientists to retrieve DNA.

Perishable Artifacts of Middle Archaic

Most interesting, however, is the recovery of 87 samples of weaving, basketry, woodworking and clothing, providing us more information on the perishable artifacts of Middle Archaic people in the American southeast than archaeologists ever dreamed possible. Four kinds of close twining, one kind of open twining, and one type of plaiting can be seen in the mats, bags, and basketry recovered from the site. Clothing woven by the inhabitants of Windover Bog on looms included hoods and burial shrouds, as well as some fitted clothing and many rectangular or squarish clothing articles.

While the perishable fiber plaits from Windover Bog are not the oldest found in the Americas, the textiles are the oldest woven materials found to date, and together they broaden our understanding of what the Archaic lifestyle was truly like.

DNA and Windover Burials

Although scientists believed they had retrieved DNA from the fairly intact brain matter recovered from some of the human burials, subsequent research has shown that the mtDNA lineages reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations studied to date. Further attempts to retrieve more DNA have failed, and an amplification study has shown that there is no analyzable DNA left in the Windover burials.

In 2011, researchers (Stojanowski et al) studied dental variation characteristics on teeth from Windover Pond (and Buckeye Knoll in Texas) that at least three of the individuals buried there had projections on incisors called "talon cusps" or an enlarged tuberculum dentale. Talon cusps are a rare trait globally but are more common in the western hemisphere than elsewhere. Those at Windover Pond and Buckeye Knoll are the oldest found in the Americas to date, and the second oldest in the world (the oldest is Gobero, Niger, at 9,500 cal BP).

Sources

This article is a part of the About.com Guide to American Archaic Period, and part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.

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Kemp BM, Monroe C, and Smith DG. 2006. Repeat silica extraction: a simple technique for the removal of PCR inhibitors from DNA extracts. Journal of Archaeological Science 33(12):1680-1689.

Moore CR, and Schmidt CW. 2009. Paleoindian And Early Archaic Organic Technologies: A Review And Analysis. North American Archaeologist 30(1):57-86.

Rothschild BM, and Woods RJ. 1993. Possible implications of paleopathology for early archaic migrations: Calcium pyrophosphate deposition disease. Journal of Paleopathology 5(1):5-15.

Stojanowski CM, Johnson KM, Doran GH, and Ricklis RA. 2011. Talon cusp from two archaic period cemeteries in North America: Implications for comparative evolutionary morphology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 144(3):411-420.

Tomczak PD, and Powell JF. 2003. Postmarital Residence Patterns in the Windover Population: Sex-Based Dental Variation as an Indicator of Patrilocality. American Antiquity 68(1):93-108.

Tuross N, Fogel ML, Newsom L, and Doran GH. 1994. Subsistence in the Florida Archaic: The stable-isotope and archaeobotanical evidence from the Windover site. American Antiquity 59(2):288-303.