The people who were at Paisley Caves 14,000 years ago were the ancestors, in a biological and cultural sense, of the people who would navigate the profound environmental changes of the early Holocene and establish the long-term patterns of Great Basin occupation that continue in modified form to the present.

The Cave as Document

One of the ways to appreciate what Paisley Caves has contributed is to think about what kind of document a cave is — what it records, how it records it, and what can be read from the record it creates.

A cave is, in one sense, a passive collector.

It receives what falls into it, blows into it, is carried into it by animals, or is deliberately deposited in it by human visitors.

Over thousands of years, this accumulation creates a sediment archive that preserves materials from many different time periods in a roughly chronological sequence.