The cumulative thinking from ethnography, near-contemporary literature and later tradition suggests the prevalence in native societies of an animistic world view: spirits, often capricious, sometimes malign, inhabited animate and inanimate objects – birds and animals, springs, rivers and dark pools. They were to be found in trees, rocks and caves,

It has recently been suggested that wood might have symbolized the world we live in and stone the permanent, everlasting realm of the ancestors.

At a point where a pocket would have been was a collection of perforated periwinkle shells, presumably either decorations for clothing or a necklace, or objects to be cast as some kind of divinatory process.

With him were placed hoops of mammoth ivory which seem to have been bracelets or castanets, and ivory structures like wands or batons, which were broken before being placed with the corpse.

In many Indigenous traditions, seeds are considered sacred.