They have been asked by the tribal nations who consult with the park about how to share this history.

The cave has kept the evidence of what happened inside it more faithfully than almost any other archaeological site in North America.

It has kept the tools, the containers, the torch fragments, the footprints, the body of the man on the ledge.

What it cannot give back is the spoken knowledge, the cultural context, the specific meaning assigned by living communities to the activities of their distant ancestors.

That knowledge was transmitted orally, from person to person, across the generations of the mining period — and when the mining stopped, and when the communities who had conducted it changed in the ways that human communities always change over two thousand years, that specific knowledge was not preserved in a way that modern researchers can recover.