They were doing what human beings do when they face the death of someone they love and cannot bear: they make the best gesture they can toward something better, somewhere else, wherever the dead go.

The extraordinary quantity and quality of the artifacts deposited with the child speaks to the depth of that grief and to the social commitments of the group.

These were not casually assembled objects.

They were the group’s most valued technological possessions — items that had taken hours to make, that had been carried hundreds of miles in some cases, that represented the accumulated skill and effort of skilled craftworkers.

Depositing them with a child who had never used them was an act of extravagant love and grief.