Brevard County ( ) is a county located in the east central portion of the U.S. state of Florida. As of the 2020 census, the population was 606,612, making it the 10th-most populated county in Florida. The official county seat is located in Titusville. Brevard County comprises the Palm Bay–Melbourne–Titusville, FL Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is located along the east Florida coast and bordered by the Atlantic Ocean. With an economy strongly influenced by the John F. Kennedy Space Center, Brevard County is also known as the Space Coast. As such, it was designated with the telephone area code 321, as in "3, 2, 1 liftoff". The county is named after Theodore Washington Brevard, an early Florida settler and state comptroller. A secondary center of county administrative offices was built beginning in 1989 in Viera, Florida, a master planned community in an unincorporated area. The county offices were developed to serve the more populous southern part of the long county. Most county offices and the primary court facility are now based in Viera. History The first Paleoindians arrived in the area near Brevard county between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago. The Paleoindians were semi-nomadic people who lived in smaller groups. After a few thousand years, a new group of settlers appeared known as "the archaic people." These people were primarily fishermen, as opposed to the hunting and gathering way of life which characterized the Paleoindians. The Windover Archeological Site, discovered in 1982, was found during excavation to have the largest collection of human remains and artifacts of the early Archaic Period (6,000-5,000 BCE), or more than 8,000 years before present. It has been designated as a National Historic Landmark. The Windover pond, which would have been a woody marsh at the time, was used by the Archaic Floridians as a burial ground, with the bodies being wrapped in fabric and submerged in the peaty soil. The pond was used for internments for around a thousand years (circa 8,000 BCE-7,000 BCE). The Ais and the Jaega were the dominant tribes in the area when it is thought that Ponce De Leon landed on the shores near Melbourne Beach in 1513. There were about 10,000 of these natives in the area. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés gave an early account of the Ais people in 1570 when he was shipwrecked off of Cape Canaveral. He faced hostile natives but through the use of