Eight thousand five hundred years ago.

When those earliest Buckeye Knoll burials were laid down, the Egyptian pyramids were more than 5,000 years in the future.

The writing systems of Mesopotamia had not yet been invented.

Europe was still in the Stone Age.

The people of China were beginning the earliest experiments with rice cultivation.

And on the coastal plain of Texas, people were burying their dead in a cemetery that would be used, continuously, for thousands of years.

The scale of what was found at Buckeye Knoll was staggering.