While I hesitate to say that there's nothing more tantalizing than a dessicated corpse,

Nah. Everybody feels that way sometimes.

they seem to be the brink of telling their secrets in a way that mere bones never do.

Because they still have faces? Or because there is so much more of their life around them—material culture, physically—it seems they should be like us, where skeletons are only us at the most mineral level?