Archaeology mattered.

The legal record mattered.

DNA mattered.

Together, they produced a result stronger than any one source could have produced alone.

That is perhaps the most durable intellectual lesson of the case: evidence becomes more powerful when institutions stop asking one discipline to do all the work.

The Great Basin As A Living Homeland

Another way to misunderstand Spirit Cave is to treat the Great Basin as a backdrop rather than an active part of the story.

The landscape is not simply where the burial happened.

It is one of the strongest forms of continuity in the case.

For thousands of years, people have moved through the valleys, wetlands, mountain ranges, lakeshores, and desert margins of what is now Nevada.