The cave holds the record of what happened.

The meaning of what happened is the archive’s fundamental silence — the question that the preserved torch fragments and the ancient footprints and the gypsum-scraped walls and the body of a man who died doing his ordinary work cannot answer.

Modern visitors walk through Mammoth Cave using mapped routes and electric light, following paths where ancient miners walked miles underground thousands of years ago, holding their bundles of burning cane, going toward the darkness with gourd bowls empty and coming back with them full.

Archaeology can reconstruct much of how they did it.