This has profound implications for what we can know about the past.

In most ancient environments, the organic materials that made up most of ancient life — textiles, food, wood, skin, hair — are gone without trace.

The archaeological record of most ancient cultures is profoundly biased toward inorganic materials that resist decay: stone, fired clay, metal.

Permafrost environments invert this bias, or at least reduce it.

The organic materials that are normally lost — the textiles that tell us about weaving technology and artistic tradition, the food that tells us about diet and ceremony, the soft tissues and skin that tell us about health and the human body — are preserved alongside the inorganic objects.

The Ice Maiden’s burial is one of the most complete pictures of an individual life and burial from the Iron Age precisely because the permafrost preserved things that would normally have disappeared.