She was over thirty years old.

She lived in Iron Age Sutherland, near the loch, in the community that built the cairn.

Her community knew her, and when she died, they did something to her body that has no direct parallel in the archaeological record of Iron Age Britain.

Then they put her back together and covered her with stones.

And the stones held her for two thousand years, until the rabbits came, until the archaeologists came, until the scientists with their microscopes and their DNA sequencers and their isotope ratios came and read the evidence she left behind.

The headline is true.

The mystery behind it is real.

And the woman at the center of it was a person, not a puzzle — a person whose community thought she was important enough to treat with the specific, elaborate, and still-incompletely-understood care that the bones document.

That is enough to make her worth knowing about.

— END —