The possibility that these were tools used in specific ritual contexts — for activities associated with the management of the dead, or with ceremonies involving the woman’s remains — is one that the archaeological literature on Iron Age Britain’s treatment of the dead can contextualize, though it cannot confirm.

Iron Age Scotland’s Invisible Dead

One of the most important facts about Iron Age Britain for understanding why the Loch Borralie discovery is significant is the near-total invisibility of the dead in the conventional archaeological record.

In the prehistoric periods that preceded the Iron Age — the Neolithic and the Bronze Age — the dead are relatively visible.

Megalithic tombs, long barrows, round barrows, cremation urns: these leave clear, identifiable archaeological traces that can be excavated and analyzed.

The dead of these periods were, in a meaningful sense, monumentalized — given physical markers that persisted in the landscape and that could be found by archaeologists millennia later.