The tools that accompanied him represented time that someone had spent — hours of skilled work, in the case of the finest bifaces and projectile points — and that investment was dedicated to a child who had not lived long enough to use those tools himself.

Whatever the specific beliefs that animated the people who buried him, they were beliefs that placed enormous value on accompanying the dead with objects of significance, on marking the passage of a community member from life to death with ceremony and care.

We cannot know what they believed about where the child was going, or what the tools were meant to provide for him in whatever existence they imagined followed death.

We cannot know what his death meant to his parents, or how long the community grieved, or whether the burial site was revisited.