The physical anthropologists measured and analyzed the bones.

The isotope chemists read the dietary records encoded in the collagen.

The radiocarbon specialists dated the collagen and fixed the burials in time.

All of this is important.

All of it adds to the human knowledge of who was here, how long they were here, and what their lives were like.

But none of it fully explains why, for 5,500 years, the people of the Edwards Plateau brought their dead to this particular shaft in the limestone.

What belief sustained that tradition across two hundred generations?