What they will almost certainly not provide is a direct, transparent record of the specific beliefs that motivated their creation.

The people who stood among these pillars more than eleven thousand years ago, who looked up at the great stone figures at the center of each enclosure, who participated in whatever ceremonies and activities the buildings were designed to support — those people are irretrievably gone.

Their specific narratives, their prayers, their names for the beings represented by the central pillars: these are not preserved in stone.

What is preserved is the achievement itself: the extraordinary result of organized, sustained, collective human effort translated into limestone and carved imagery and the specific spatial arrangements that gave each enclosure its character.