Skin, hair, clothing — the organic materials that give an ancient person their most immediate human reality — almost never do.

At Spirit Cave, they did.

The individual was wrapped in two tule mats — woven from the stems of bulrush plants — and a rabbit-skin blanket.

These materials are extraordinarily perishable in most contexts.

Two thousand years of burial would reduce them to unrecognizable fragments in most environments.

At Spirit Cave, they survived in a condition that allowed researchers to examine their construction, identify their materials, and eventually subject them to radiocarbon dating.

The moccasins on the man’s feet were similarly preserved.