It looks like contemporary Idaho farming country: flat, productive, organized around the efficient delivery of river water to fields.

The deep geological time visible in the basalt canyon walls is the only obvious signal that this is a place with a long history.

But the history is there, layered into the sediments above the flood gravel.

Windblown loess accumulated after the floods.

Colluvium washed down from the canyon walls.

And in those accumulated sediments, people — the first people to live in this landscape — made their camps, dug their burials, ate their salmon and their game, made their clothing and their tools, and lived in a world that was still finding its post-glacial form.

One of those people was buried in a specific spot, with specific objects, 2.5 kilometers north of the town that would later grow up around the irrigation canal system that transformed this landscape.