Creating a headpiece of ivory is a skilled craft task that draws on both technical knowledge and artistic vision.

Someone had that knowledge.

Someone applied that vision.

And they applied it to the making of a crown for a child who had died before his fourth birthday.

The bird carvings occupy a category of their own.

Among all the objects associated with the Mal’ta burial, the bird-shaped ivory pieces are the ones that most clearly speak to symbolic life — to the existence, among these people, of a mental world that included categories and concepts beyond the immediately practical.

Birds mean things.