People had been living along the shores and in the caves of this landscape for thousands of years.

Spirit Cave sits near what were once the margins of this wetland system — elevated enough to be out of the way of seasonal flooding, but close enough to the ancient lake margins to have been a productive location for a community that lived by the water.

The cave’s orientation and dimensions made it naturally dry, and that dryness would prove to be the key to an extraordinary preservation that the Wheelers could not have fully appreciated in 1940.

The region around Spirit Cave today bears almost no resemblance to what the people buried there would have known.