It was a single dramatic event, in an extreme location, that left almost no material trace except a skeleton and some torch marks.

This distinguishes Hourglass Cave from most of the other important cave sites in the archaeology of the American West, and it places the man’s death in a category that is genuinely unusual: not an accidental deposition into a cave through natural processes, not a deliberate burial in a conventional sense, but a human being who went deep into a cave and died there.

The nearest parallels — and they are not exact parallels — might be found in the deep cave sites of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe, where people carried lamps and torches into deep cave passages specifically to create art, or in some Mesoamerican cave sites where ritual deposits were made in deep or difficult cave areas.

But these parallels involve cultural contexts that are very different from the early Holocene Colorado Rockies, and using them to interpret the Hourglass Cave evidence would involve importing cultural assumptions that are not supported by the available evidence.