The site remains important as a burial context and as an assemblage, but it no longer serves as the chronological anchor it was treated as for two decades.

What Archaeology Owes The Past

There is a philosophical dimension to the Buhl case that extends beyond the specific scientific debates it generated.

Archaeology is, among other things, the discipline of recovering what can be known about the deep human past from physical evidence.

The past cannot speak for itself; it must be spoken for by the physical things it left behind and by the methods that researchers develop to read those things.

The responsibility of archaeology, in this framing, is to read as carefully and as honestly as possible — to recover what the evidence actually supports rather than what would be convenient or dramatic to claim.