Drawing on what is known about the beliefs of Native peoples in the American Southwest and northern Mexico, researchers have proposed that these natural vertical shafts — leading down into the dark interior of the earth — were understood as symbolic entrances to the underworld, or what some traditions describe as the world of the ancestors.

The dead were not tossed in.

They were carefully placed within these limestone passages, accompanied by objects that mattered — shell ornaments from coasts hundreds of miles away, antler tools, stone artifacts, items that spoke of a life lived on the plateau.

The sinkhole was a doorway.

The people who placed their dead within it believed they were sending them somewhere.

When the landowner descended into Bering Sinkhole and found those skulls, he was looking at the preserved remains of this ancient practice — a cemetery in use for thousands of years, sealed by limestone walls, its contents preserved by the unusual underground environment of the Texas Hill Country.