The question of what the people who built that cairn believed, and what they understood themselves to be doing, is not answerable from the physical evidence alone.

But the evidence is now clear that they were doing something deliberate and meaningful, and that the woman at the center of it was someone whose death and afterlife mattered to the community that survived her.

That is the truest and most durable thing the Loch Borralie bones can tell us.

And it is enough to make her, two thousand years later and across the gulf of an entirely different world, recognizable as a person whose life and death were understood by those who knew her as having weight and significance that extended beyond the ordinary and into something that demanded their most careful attention.

The cairn held her.