The Loch Borralie discovery is ultimately a story about how people remember their dead — about the practices, beliefs, and material investments through which living communities maintain relationships with those who have died and about what those relationships were understood to be.

Memory is not only cognitive; it is also material.

The cairn of stones that marks the burial location at Loch Borralie is a material investment in memory — a persistent physical trace that marks the location of these individuals in the landscape and that ensures that the location remains recognizable as significant across time.

The construction of the cairn was an act of remembrance, and its persistence to the present day means that the remembrance has, in a certain sense, persisted too.

The post-mortem treatment of Individual 1’s body — if it is understood as preparation for a form of ongoing presence within the community — is also a form of material memory.