What the Bones Tell Us About Belief

The final and perhaps deepest question that the Loch Borralie evidence raises is a question about belief — about how the people who performed these actions on this woman’s remains understood the relationship between the physical body and whatever they understood as the person who had inhabited it.

The elaborate post-mortem processing of her body, and the careful reassembly that followed it, reflects an understanding of the body that is not easy to summarize in modern terms.

It was not simply a container for a soul or self that had departed at death, to be disposed of in whatever way was most convenient.