The red ochre that saturated the Anzick burial — coating the human remains and many of the artifacts — is one of the burial’s most distinctive features and one of its most evocative.

Red ochre, iron oxide in its powdered form, has been used in human burials across an extraordinary range of cultures and time periods.

Its use in mortuary contexts is documented from Africa and the Middle East in specimens dating back more than 100,000 years, through the Upper Paleolithic of Europe and Asia, and across the Americas from the earliest well-documented burials through the contact period and beyond.

Its widespread use across independent cultural traditions around the world over such an extended time period suggests that it has repeatedly been associated with beliefs and practices related to death, the afterlife, blood, life force, or similar concepts — though the specific meanings attributed to it vary enormously across cultures and cannot be generalized.