Communities that bury their dead in a specific location assign that location a particular status in their cosmology.

The cave was not merely a mine.

It was, by the evidence of the burials, a place where the living and the dead could coexist — a threshold between the world of ordinary life and whatever lay beyond it.

This duality — practical and sacred, mineral source and burial ground — is consistent with what archaeologists and anthropologists have documented in other Indigenous cultures’ relationships with underground spaces.

The underground is different.