The artifacts found with the burials told a story of connection.

Marine shells — from the Gulf of Mexico coast, hundreds of miles to the southeast — had been fashioned into ornaments and placed with the dead.

Antler tools.

Stone artifacts made from local flint.

The material culture of people who were mobile but not isolated, who were connected through trade and kinship to wider networks across the region and beyond.

And the bones told their own story, one that physical anthropologists and, later, geneticists would work to interpret.

The Remarkable Record At Buckeye Knoll