The 168 people buried in that pond were members of a community that knew this place.

They chose it — deliberately, consistently, over what appears to have been multiple generations — as the appropriate place for their dead.

They wrapped their dead in complex woven fabric, positioned them carefully, oriented their heads toward the west, and anchored them in the peat with wooden stakes.

They placed personal ornaments on their youngest members, tools with their working-age members, acknowledgment with their elders and their disabled.

They did this 8,000 years ago, and the conditions of the pond happened to preserve traces of what they did.