About the specific individual who occupied this tomb — her physical characteristics, her adornments, her possible ailments, her tattoos.

And it left open the most important question of all: who was she, really, as a person?

What did she know, what did she value, what did the world look like from behind her blue-tattooed shoulder?

That question cannot be answered.

But the fact that we can ask it — the fact that a specific woman who lived and died in the Iron Age Altai is known to us as a specific person, rather than as an abstraction or a statistic — is itself the achievement of the ice.

She is, imperfectly and partially but genuinely, known.