This suggests that the Native Americans in the Late Woodland period put the bones on the surface during the burial rather than digging deeper into the earth.
There are some hypotheses that, based on the remains, the people might have been on a maize plant diet because their teeth were similar to the southwest Virginia Late Woodland village sites.
In 1986, the University of Tennessee’s Midsouth Anthropological Research Corporation discovered remains of 11 bodies at Bull Thistle Cave.
Before the Marginella Burial Cave Project could start collecting artifacts, they needed to submit an analytical research design.
The first was to record the “location and edaphic attributes including geographic setting, elevation, aspect, association with water, drainage, slope, landform, and physiographic province.
Finally, the design encouraged public education to enforce efforts to sustain Virginia state burial caves.
The board punishes anyone who purposefully harms the caves when they “excavate, remove, destroy, injure, deface, or in any manner disturb any burial grounds, historic or prehistoric resources, archaeological or paleontological site or any part thereof, including relics, inscriptions, saltpeter workings, fossils, bones, remains of historical human activity.