Not just presence — the simple fact that people were there — but competent, knowledgeable, culturally equipped human presence in a specific landscape at a specific time.

People doing what people do: living, adapting, surviving, and leaving behind the traces that, 14,000 years later, would become evidence of their extraordinary antiquity.

— COMPLETE END —

The Sediment Record as Historical Witness

Every site has a formation history — a specific sequence of events by which the physical evidence it contains came to be deposited, preserved, and arranged in the way that archaeologists find it.

The formation history of Paisley Caves is, like all cave formation histories, complex; but it is not so complex that it prevents meaningful interpretation, and understanding its specific character helps explain why the evidence recovered there is as informative as it is.