The Bones In The Dark

There is something irreducibly powerful about the fact that the ancient Texans chose to place their dead in the dark places of the earth.

The sinkholes of the Edwards Plateau — vertical shafts dropping from the sunlit surface into the limestone interior, into cave chambers where no light penetrates — are not randomly selected burial locations.

They were chosen, deliberately and consistently, over generations.

The communities of the plateau understood these openings in the ground as passages to another realm — the realm of the dead, the world of the ancestors, the underworld that lies beneath the living surface of the earth.