Field Journal, Dig Site 12, Domestic Stratum.
We have at last identified the purpose of the Perforated Vessel, that ubiquitous basin of woven synthetic reed found in nearly every dwelling of the Screen People, always near the sleeping chamber. My colleagues insisted for years it was a granary. They were wrong. The perforations are too coarse to hold grain; they are, we now understand, designed to let the spirit breathe.
Consider the evidence. The vessel is invariably discovered brimming with soft woven skins, the very garments the Ancients wore against their bodies. These skins were not folded, not honored, but heaped in apparent chaos, one atop another, a mound of shed selves. This was no carelessness. This was interment. The Screen People, we now believe, could not bear to simply discard a garment that had touched them, that had absorbed their warmth and their scent through a long day of standing before the glowing tablets.
So they laid each one to rest here, in the breathing basket, for a period of mourning.
Wear patterns on the twin handles suggest the vessel was carried, ceremonially, from sleeping chamber to a smaller humid room, and back again. A pilgrimage. The garments emerged from these journeys transformed, warm and fragrant, and were then worn once more, which tells us the Ancients believed in the return of the dead. Rebirth through ritual heat.
Note the recurring inscription along one rim of the finest specimens: a single small tag reading DO NOT BLEACH. A prohibition. A sacred word we have not yet decoded, but clearly the name of some forbidden god.
They were a people who could not throw anything away without first grieving it, then hoping, against all reason, to hold it warm again.