This cosmological understanding — that the earth contains a world of the dead, accessible through natural openings in the limestone, sacred and dangerous and connected to the ancestral powers — is not unique to the Texas plateau.

Similar beliefs are documented among Native peoples across the Americas and across the world.

But in Texas, this belief expressed itself with particular intensity and persistence in the use of limestone sinkholes as cemeteries — a practice that continued for thousands of years at Bering Sinkhole, maintained generation after generation by people who understood the dark shafts as sacred passages.

When the landowner descended into Bering Sinkhole and found the skulls, he was, in a sense, entering that sacred passage himself — finding, in the darkness underground, the accumulated dead of a tradition he could not have imagined persisting for five and a half thousand years.

The archaeologists who followed him documented what was there.