A Final Return — To The Young Woman And The Gravel

The young woman who was buried north of Buhl, Idaho, in the gravel above the Bonneville flood deposits has now been underground for a long time in two senses: the first in the centuries after her death, when the windblown and colluvial sediments gradually covered her and her grave goods; the second since December 1991, when she was interred on the Fort Hall Reservation with the ceremony and respect that the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes accorded to her.

She lived seventeen to twenty-one years, which in the terminal Pleistocene was not necessarily considered young in the way that it seems young to us.

Many people in that world did not survive to middle age.