Beginning with Patty Jo Watson’s work in the early 1960s and continuing through subsequent decades of research, archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct the routes that ancient miners followed through the cave.

The evidence for route reconstruction comes from multiple sources: the distribution of torch fragments and their radiocarbon dates, the location of mining marks on cave walls, the positions of abandoned artifacts, and the patterns of footprints and passage disturbance in the cave’s fine sediment.

Together, these sources allow researchers to establish, with reasonable confidence, which passages were used most heavily, which were explored and quickly abandoned, and what the general pattern of cave penetration looked like.

The picture that emerges is one of organized and systematic exploration.