Traditional knowledge of the coastal-interior trade networks and of the relationships between the peoples on either side of the mountains provided context that the isotope analysis and the clothing evidence could confirm but not generate independently.

The salmon in the stomach, the coastal hat, the evidence of mixed coastal and interior diet — all of these scientific findings made sense within the framework of traditional knowledge about how people lived and moved in this landscape.

The meeting of scientific evidence and traditional knowledge around Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi was not a simple case of Western science confirming Indigenous oral tradition, nor of traditional knowledge correcting Western science.

It was a more complex and more interesting engagement: two different ways of knowing the past, each with its own methods and its own limitations, illuminating different aspects of the same human reality.