The skull, prepared for curation, would have carried the visible presence of her face and head through whatever period it was maintained.

The bone tools, worked from her remains and used in activities that the community understood as connected to her, would have been physical embodiments of her continuing participation in community life.

This understanding of material culture as a medium for memory and relationship is not a modern imposition on ancient practices.

It is a framework developed within archaeological anthropology from extensive cross-cultural study of how communities maintain relationships with their dead, and it fits naturally with the evidence of complex post-mortem treatment of significant individuals that appears at multiple sites in prehistoric Britain and Europe.

The Loch Borralie evidence extends this framework in a specific and unusual direction: the evidence that the material substance of a person’s body could be converted into tools without severing the relationship between the community and that person, because the tools were returned to the burial when their use was complete.