The 19 miles of passages where their presence has been confirmed in Mammoth Cave alone exceeds the documented deep cave presence of any other ancient group.

The miner who died in 1935’s discovery — who was doing exactly what his predecessors had done for centuries before him when the boulder fell — was not doing something unusual by his community’s standards.

He was doing something ordinary, something that was part of the regular economic or ceremonial life of his people.

Which makes the scale of what the ordinary involved all the more astonishing.

The Archive And Its Silence