Most of what Iron Age people made — their wooden structures, their woven textiles, their leather and fiber objects, the organic materials that formed the vast majority of their material culture — is gone.

The metal objects that survive are rare and have typically been preserved by specific circumstances: deliberate deposition in water, burial in specific soil conditions, chance survival.

The bone tools and modified skull that have made Loch Borralie famous survived because the specific environmental conditions of northwest Scotland happened to protect them.

But the cairn — the stones arranged over the burial — has survived not because of environmental luck but because stone is simply durable.

The people who built the cairn were not thinking about the archaeology of the twenty-first century; they were building something that would persist in the landscape, that would mark this location as significant to the people who came after them.