From a purely scientific standpoint, it was also a permanent closure.

As the Texas Beyond History project, a public education initiative of the University of Texas, noted afterward: “From a scientific perspective, it is very doubtful that any Indian peoples speaking any of the Athapascan languages — such as Lipan Apache — are actually descendants of those who were buried at Buckeye Knoll.”

The statement reflects one of the fundamental tensions in the archaeology of very ancient remains: the individuals who are most scientifically valuable, precisely because they are so ancient, are also the individuals whose cultural affiliation with any contemporary tribe is hardest to establish.

The further back you go, the more likely it is that the populations of the past were organized differently, spoke different languages, and had different cultural traditions from anything that survived into the historical period.