Pilar Luna and her team brought the legal, institutional, and methodological framework within which the investigation of Hoyo Negro would have to operate — the cave was a significant archaeological site, and in Mexico, significant archaeological sites are federal property managed by INAH.

The investigation of Naia’s remains was not a project that could be conducted without INAH’s involvement and authorization.

The combination of trained cave divers and professional archaeologists created the specific challenge of making each group’s expertise legible to the other.

Archaeologists needed to understand the specific constraints and hazards of deep cave diving in order to design a documentation protocol that was both scientifically rigorous and practically achievable.

Divers needed to understand the principles of archaeological documentation well enough to implement them in a context where the full attention of everyone involved was normally occupied by the demands of safe diving.