Twenty-seven centuries ago, a community along the Adriatic coast of central Italy buried its dead with objects meant to signal something about who they were — or who they wished to be remembered as. A new isotopic study of the Novilara necropolis has now read a different record, one written not in amber and weapons but in the chemistry of ancient bone, revealing that the inequality which truly shaped daily life was gendered and invisible to the grave, while the prestige displayed in burial was a social performance disconnected from actual living conditions. What the dead were given and what th