It belongs also to the people who have lived there — who continue to live there — across the generations that the scientific investigation is trying to document.

The Trail Creek child was one inhabitant of a landscape that has had many inhabitants, and the story of that landscape’s human history is not complete until it incorporates both the ancient evidence that science can recover and the living knowledge that the communities whose homeland it is maintain.

The Final Object: A Tooth in History

In the natural history of objects, most things are lost.

The overwhelming majority of the physical world that ever existed — the bodies of organisms, the tools of industries, the materials of buildings, the words of conversations — is gone, dissolved or decayed or dispersed into forms no longer recognizable as what they were.