Although the cave was situated on the Maya frontier, it appeared to belong to an entirely different and virtually unknown culture. While the Maya also buried their dead in caves, the way in which these bones were arranged and the kinds of artifacts that had been left with them were different from what one would expect from Maya cave burials. The ossuary was the work of a sophisticated, socially stratified, and artistically advanced culture, one that developed astonishingly early, even before the Maya.
