The amount of time and intention required to perform these actions — the fracturing of the cranial base, the interior skull work, the careful modification of four separate long bones, the final assembly and deposition — indicates that this was an investment of effort by people who were doing something they understood as important.

Whether the woman was being honored, remembered, used, consumed, or prepared for a continuing role as an ancestor-figure, the people who handled her remains treated that handling as significant.

The study’s authors put it well when they describe the care of the reassembly as suggesting that “she commanded a level of reverence and respect by her community.” That phrase doesn’t fully answer the question of what happened to her, but it is a reminder that the archaeological evidence, however strange and unsettling it appears from the outside, was produced by people who understood it as expressing something meaningful about their relationship with the dead.

The Detective Work of Forensic Osteology