They do not record what it meant.

The oral traditions that would give cultural context to the physical evidence — the stories, explanations, ceremonial prescriptions, and practical knowledge that told ancient mining communities why they went underground and what to do when they got there — were not written down.

They were transmitted person to person, voice to voice, across the generations of the mining period.

When the mining stopped and the communities changed, those specific oral traditions changed with them.

What the seven affiliated nations who consult with the park today know about their distant ancestors’ underground activities is not a direct inheritance from the Early Woodland mining period but a relationship to a much longer and more complex history.