Their work, and the broader tradition of archaeological research that Patty Jo Watson initiated in the 1960s, has established what can be known with confidence and has been honest about where the limits of knowledge lie.

What can be known: people went miles underground, repeatedly, for centuries, with specific tools selected for specific tasks, and they collected specific minerals in organized operations that imply planning, coordination, and cultural value assigned to the activity.

The evidence for this is overwhelming and detailed.

What cannot be known: exactly what those minerals did once they reached the surface, what they meant in the cosmological frameworks of the communities that collected them, what ceremony or trade or medicine they enabled, and what the experience of going miles underground in darkness meant to the people who did it — whether it was purely practical or whether it was also transformative, whether the darkness was simply the medium through which the minerals had to be reached or whether the darkness itself was part of the point.

The Second Opening — What The Cave Reveals About Human Motivation