It is an honest reflection of the limits of what material evidence can tell us about the past.

The physical record is extraordinarily informative about what happened; it is silent about the inner world of the people who made it happen.

The recognition of this limit is itself part of what the Loch Borralie evidence contributes.

It demonstrates, with unusual specificity, how much can be known about the physical treatment of the dead in Iron Age Scotland, and it simultaneously makes clear how much remains beyond the reach of physical evidence.

The why question — why she specifically, why this sequence of actions, why the careful reassembly at the end — will require historical, anthropological, and comparative analysis to approach, and even then may not be fully answerable.