The sites we know the most about, from a skeletal perspective, are the sites where preservation conditions happened to be favorable — which means they are not necessarily representative of Iron Age communities as a whole.

The practices visible at Loch Borralie may be widespread across Iron Age Britain, or they may be regionally specific to the northwest; the evidence to distinguish these possibilities is not available because the preservation record is too incomplete.

The implication for how we interpret the Loch Borralie evidence is important.

We should not assume that this unusual treatment of the dead was unique to one community in Sutherland, or even unique to the northwest of Scotland.

We should consider that it may reflect a category of practice that was more widely distributed but that has been rendered invisible in most of Britain by the destruction of the physical evidence through taphonomic processes over two thousand years.