The eyed needle from the Buhl burial is, in some ways, the most significant object in the assemblage — not because it is the most flashy or the most directly tied to the archaeological debates the burial entered, but because of what it tells us about the invisible side of early American life.

Archaeology tends to recover the durable.

Stone tools survive for tens of thousands of years with minimal change.

Bone objects survive in favorable preservation environments.

Ceramics, when they exist, are nearly indestructible.

But the organic materials that made up the majority of what ancient people actually used — woven fiber, worked leather, wooden handles and hafts, cordage, baskets, matting — survive only in exceptional circumstances, in extremely dry or waterlogged environments where decay is retarded.

The effect of this differential preservation is to skew our picture of early human life toward the hard and the sharp.