The gravel bars it left behind are the foundation on which the modern landscape of the Snake River Plain is built.

Above those gravels, the burial sediments had accumulated: windblown dust and colluvium from the slopes above, building up over the millennia after the flood.

The burial was made in these accumulated sediments — into a landscape that was still recovering, still changing, still being shaped by the processes that the end of the Pleistocene set in motion.

The salmon that the Buhl Woman ate were making their way up a river system that was itself in transition — the Snake River cutting its canyon into the post-flood terrain, the salmon runs adjusting to changing channel configurations and water temperatures as the glacial melt slowed.

The people who lived here were part of a web of ecological relationships that was, in 12,000 BCE or whenever the burial actually dates, still being established in its post-glacial form.