Armant stood within the religious landscape of Montu, a god closely associated with royal strength and warfare. The Buchis bull formed an important living expression of that divine power. Its cult also acquired connections with Ra and with the funerary world of Osiris. The distinctive white body and dark face associated with Buchis helped separate this sacred animal from other Egyptian bull traditions. When one bull died, its burial was a religious event, while recognition of a successor continued the living cult.

The recorded burials at the Bucheum reach back to the reign of Nectanebo II in the mid-fourth century BCE. Burial chambers and substantial stone sarcophagi gave the bulls a lasting funerary home. Their bodies were prepared for burial through mummification, translating a living religious presence into an enduring place among the dead. The investment of labour and materials expressed their status, while the successive tombs created a landscape of remembrance. Different phases of construction, ancient disturbance and later damage all form part of the site's archaeological history.

Commemorative stelae are among the site's most valuable sources. They can record dates in a bull's life and connect its installation or death with the reign of a ruler. Such inscriptions allow historians to study the continuity of the cult under changing dynasties. Individual monuments preserve named rulers, religious titles and a community's formal remembrance of an animal regarded as sacred. Read alongside the excavated tombs, they turn the Bucheum from a collection of burial chambers into a source for the religious and political history of Armant.

The mothers of the Buchis bulls received their own honours. Their cemetery, the Baqaria, lay near the Bucheum but was a separate burial complex, not another name for it. This distinction matters because the two sites record related aspects of the same religious tradition. The bull embodied a divine presence, while the cow that bore it also acquired special significance. Together, the cemeteries show that the cult's attention extended beyond the lifetime and burial of the principal sacred animal.

The Buchis tradition continued under Ptolemaic and Roman rule. The final funerary stela is commonly dated to 340 CE following Jean-Claude Grenier's study of the inscription. Its association with the dating era beginning under Diocletian refers to a system of counting years, not to an emperor still reigning at that date. This distinction places the monument within a later Roman setting. The inscription provides important evidence for the endurance of the cult during a period of major religious change, even though the precise course of its final decline remains difficult to reconstruct.

Modern investigation developed through the Armant excavations supported by Robert Mond and associated with the Egypt Exploration Society. Work in the later 1920s and 1930s involved several directors, including Walter Bryan Emery and Oliver Myers. Mond and Myers published The Bucheum in three volumes in 1934, while wider work at Armant continued afterwards. The excavators encountered a site already affected by robbery and disturbance, rather than a pristine complex sealed since its final burial. Their records, photographs and recovered inscriptions remain essential for understanding what the surviving architecture alone cannot show.