The ancient sites, the Inca and pre-Inca architecture, the layers of history that the jungle has been covering and preserving simultaneously. Lara goes further into the past with each tomb — the Mayan, the Inca, the civilizations whose catastrophes she is trying to prevent from repeating. The pulling away from who she was is the game's account of what the archaeology costs: you cannot spend this much time with what civilization was without it changing your relationship with what you are.

The steps are literal and accumulative — the game's traversal is its argument, the physical movement into the earth and the past being the same motion as the psychological movement away from the surface-world version of Lara Croft.