Radiocarbon dating established that the earliest burials at Bering Sinkhole dated to approximately 5000 BCE — placing them in the latter Early Archaic period, when the people of the Plateau were becoming increasingly sophisticated in their adaptation to the post-glacial Texas environment.

The latest burials dated to approximately 500 CE, meaning the site was in use for roughly 5,500 years.

Five thousand five hundred years of continuous use as a burial ground.

That span alone — longer than the entire history of classical civilization from ancient Sumer to the present — speaks to the stability of the populations who used the sinkhole and to the strength of the traditions that made it sacred.

Generation after generation, for two hundred generations, the people of the central Edwards Plateau brought their dead to this same dark shaft in the limestone and committed them to the underworld.