What understanding of the dead and their relationship to the living made this specific dark place the right one for the passage from one world to the next?

Those are not questions that archaeology can answer.

They belong to the interior life of the ancient Texans — to their experience of loss, of continuity, of the cosmos — and that interior life has not been preserved in the bones or the artifacts.

It persists only in the fact of the practice itself: the repeated, generation-after-generation return to the same limestone shaft, the careful placement of the dead within it, the offerings laid alongside them.

Someone cared.