They did not know how far into the future the cairn would persist, or who would eventually open it and read what it contained.

But they built something permanent, and it is permanent.

This persistence across two thousand years, and the recovery of meaning from the physical evidence within the cairn, is itself one of the more remarkable things about the Loch Borralie discovery.

The people who built that cairn invested their labor in a structure that would outlast them, that would mark the location of these two individuals in the landscape, that would preserve the remains of a woman whose body had been treated with such unusual care.

And two thousand years later, their investment has paid a kind of dividend they could not have anticipated: the recovery, through scientific analysis, of some portion of what they understood about her and about what was done in her name.