The specific network documented — linking the north coast of mainland Scotland to the Northern Isles and to sites on the northwest coast — is a regional expression of the same general pattern of maritime social networks that characterized Iron Age communities across Atlantic Europe.

What this means for understanding the Loch Borralie funerary practices is that those practices should be seen in the context of this connected world rather than as local, isolated behaviors.

The people who buried Individual 1 in the ways they did were part of communities that were in contact with other communities across significant distances.

Their funerary practices, unusual as they appear in the limited surviving record, may have been intelligible and perhaps not even particularly unusual to contemporaries across a broad maritime region.

The Archaeology of Memory