It had become part of her body.

And when she died and was placed in the sinkhole, it came with her.

The Environment They Inhabited — Texas Eight Thousand Years Ago

To understand who the ancient Texans were, you need to understand the world they lived in — because it was meaningfully different from the Texas of today.

Eight thousand five hundred years ago, when the earliest Buckeye Knoll burials were being laid down, the climate of central and coastal Texas was still in the post-glacial transition.

The great ice sheets of the Pleistocene had retreated northward, but the climate had not yet settled into the pattern of the modern period.