The land where the Paisley Caves are located is within the ancestral territory of multiple Indigenous nations of the northern Great Basin, including the Northern Paiute and Klamath peoples.

These nations have their own oral traditions, their own accounts of their relationships to the land and its history, and their own perspectives on what the archaeological evidence means for their communities.

The relationship between ancient archaeological evidence and living Indigenous communities is not simply one of passive reception — of communities waiting to learn from scientists what their own history was.

Indigenous peoples have maintained continuous relationships with their ancestral landscapes through the generations, and the knowledge embedded in those relationships — oral traditions, place names, ecological knowledge, ceremonial practices — represents a different kind of historical record that can complement and enrich the archaeological and genetic evidence.