For most of American history, the remarkable preservation of Indigenous artifacts inside Mammoth Cave was treated as curiosity or spectacle rather than scientific evidence.

Early visitors to the cave in the nineteenth century saw the mummified human remains, the woven sandals, the torch fragments, and the gourd bowls, and they understood these things as relics of a vanished past — interesting, strange, but not systematically analyzed.

The transformation of that understanding began in the 1960s, when Patty Jo Watson and her husband, the philosopher and speleologist Richard Watson, began the systematic archaeological study of Salts Cave and Mammoth Cave.

Their work, and the work of the interdisciplinary teams they assembled and collaborated with over the following decades, produced the most detailed scientific account of prehistoric cave use ever assembled for North America.