The artifacts have been studied and described.

The scientific findings have been published and have entered the broader literature of American archaeology.

What the sinkhole cannot give back is the living reality of the people who used it — the specific voices, the specific faces, the specific stories of the sixty-two individuals whose remains were found within it.

Those are gone, as thoroughly as anything human ever disappears, preserved only in the most indirect and partial ways by the physical materials that outlasted the flesh and the memory and the community.

But even the indirect and partial preservation is extraordinary, measured against what might have been known.