The language carries within it the accumulated knowledge of generations of people who have lived in the Great Basin, who have developed names and concepts for every feature of the landscape, every resource, every seasonal pattern of the environment.

That knowledge — encoded in language, transmitted across generations — is evidence of precisely the kind of long occupation and deep landscape relationship that the DNA results confirmed in molecular terms.

The DNA confirmed what the Tribe had always known.

The Tribe’s continuing engagement with its landscape and its language carries forward what the DNA cannot preserve.

The Site Itself And Its Protections

Spirit Cave is a protected archaeological site on federal land administered by the Bureau of Land Management.