For whom the child’s passage from living to dead was an event that required ritual acknowledgment, material preparation, and communal action.

That is a human portrait, even without the specifics.

It is a portrait of a community that had, in some form, a relationship with the invisible — with the category of meaning that goes beyond the immediately visible and material.

That portrait is part of what the grave goods provide, even if the beads can never tell us what the people who placed them thought they meant.

Coming Full Circle: A Stone, A Child, Two Continents