Excavation Site 44, Domestic Chamber, Hearth-Room of a High Matriarch.
We identified her rank immediately by the density of vessels. Where lesser Screen People stored perhaps three cooking-idols, this chamber held forty, nested one inside the next in descending size, a clear ceremonial hierarchy. The largest bore burn-marks on its underside consistent with generations of sacred use. It had never been discarded. Among the Ancients, we now believe, an object that refused to break was an object that had earned the right to remain.
The walls were papered in flat pigmented tiles depicting other, smaller Screen People, arranged by height. These we take to be ancestor-effigies, the matriarch's private pantheon, positioned so the cooking-fire would warm them daily. Note that the tiles nearest the hearth were the most faded. She favored certain ancestors over others, and the fire told us which.
Most striking is the ritual vessel we have designated the Tin of False Promise: a round metal container, its exterior illustrated with sewing-thread, its interior holding not thread at all but hardened sugar-relics and dense fibrous cakes wrapped in waxed leaves. Every High Matriarch's chamber contains one. The mismatch between the vessel's inscription and its contents was, we are certain, a test of intimacy: only the initiated knew what the tin truly held. Outsiders were meant to be deceived.
She fed people. This much survives beyond dispute. The chamber opens outward, wider than any private room should be, worn smooth in a path from hearth to threshold, as though it existed less to shelter one body than to receive many. We find no evidence she ate alone. We find every evidence she waited.
These were a people who measured their own worth in mouths returning, who built their most durable monuments not from stone but from the certainty that someone hungry would come back.