The Loch Borralie modification is distinctive within this broader context because of the combination of features: the deliberate working of the bones into a specific functional form, the evidence that at least one of the modified bones was actually used as an implement before being returned to the burial, and the care with which the modified bones were then placed back in their correct anatomical positions within the cairn.

The last of these features is perhaps the most analytically significant.

In contexts where human bones have been worked into tools and discarded in settlement or midden deposits, the tool form is preserved but the relationship between the tool and the original burial context of the individual is severed.

At Loch Borralie, the modified bones were brought back and returned to the body — or to the representation of the body that the careful anatomical arrangement in the cairn produced.

This suggests that the modification of the bones into tools and the return of those tools to the burial were understood as parts of a single process — not the conversion of a body into raw material for tool production, but something more like the temporary borrowing of a person’s physical substance for purposes that required that substance, followed by the restoration of the person’s physical completeness in the burial.