This is one of the reasons why sites like Loch Borralie are so scientifically valuable.

They provide windows into practices and behaviors that the overall pattern of evidence obscures, and they generate hypotheses that can be tested through the analysis of evidence from other sites where preservation conditions may allow comparable discoveries.

The Community That Remembered Her

One of the interpretive threads running through the Loch Borralie research is the question of what kind of community would perform this kind of treatment of a body, and what that community’s relationship to its dead would have looked like from the inside.

The DNA evidence that the Loch Borralie individuals were connected to communities more than a hundred miles away — across the sea, in Orkney — suggests a world of maritime social networks in which communities maintained relationships across significant distances.