The disaster did not end the community.

It ended part of the physical infrastructure of the community and created, inadvertently, the conditions for the extraordinary preservation that five centuries later would allow the detailed study of what had been lost.

This is not a story about a lost people or a lost civilization.

It is a story about a community that survived a disaster, maintained its cultural continuity, and eventually recovered material evidence of the specific moment the disaster preserved.

The disaster that created the archive was not a grace, from the perspective of those who experienced it.