The power of the 2024 study lies partly in what it demonstrates about the limits of traditional archaeological methods and the capabilities that ancient genomics adds to the investigative toolkit.

Traditional archaeological analysis of the chultún remains would have yielded significant information.

The skeletal material itself — the bones and teeth of the children — can reveal information about age at death, about growth and development, about the presence of pathological conditions that affected the skeleton, and about some aspects of diet and geographic origin through stable isotope analysis.

Radiocarbon dating of the skeletal material provides chronological information about when the individuals died.

The archaeological context — the feature itself, its relationship to other features at the site, the associated artifacts if any — provides information about the spatial and architectural setting of the interments.