Alberto Nava, who co-led the dive team that discovered the chamber in 2007, had been diving in the Yucatán cave systems for years before Hoyo Negro.

Cave diving is a discipline with a steep learning curve and an unforgiving error margin — the global cave diving community is small enough that most experienced cave divers know each other, and the losses within that community to accidents are a regular reminder of what the environment can do to those who underestimate it.

Nava and his colleagues were experienced enough to recognize what they had found and cautious enough to understand that extracting useful scientific information from Hoyo Negro would require a different approach than they had ever taken before.

The connection between the divers and the professional archaeological community came through INAH, Mexico’s federal agency for archaeology and anthropology.