The possibilities include that they died at approximately the same time — that their shared presence in the burial reflects a shared event of some kind, such as an accident, an episode of illness, or some other circumstance that took two people from the same kinship network at roughly the same time.

Or that the community had specific norms about who could share a burial cairn — norms that would include individuals from the same kinship network even if they were not the most immediate family members.

The differential treatment of the two bodies within the same burial context is significant regardless of why they were buried together.

It suggests that the elaborate post-mortem processing of Individual 1 was specific to her — to her age, her status, the circumstances of her death, or some combination of these factors — and was not applied automatically to everyone who shared a burial location with her.

Three Thousand Miles of Water: The Atlantic Iron Age