Archaeologists Baffled By A 2,000-Year-Old Skeleton Found In Scotland With Its Brain Scooped Out And Its Bones Turned Into Tools

The story of how the Loch Borralie discovery was made has a specific temporal structure that deserves acknowledgment: there was the initial excavation in 2000, the first analysis and report, the storage of the remains, and then — twenty-five years later — the re-examination that transformed the interpretation.

This temporal structure is not unusual in archaeology, but the scale of the transformation in interpretation is unusually large.

The original investigators who reported the 2000 excavation were working with the analytical tools and frameworks available to them at the time.

The attribution of marks on the bones to animal gnawing was a reasonable interpretation given what was visible, and it was not obviously wrong in the way that a gross factual error would be wrong.

It was an interpretation made in good faith with appropriate evidence.