I literally think it conveys no information at all. It's a metaphor, and a metaphor that the hearer won't understand unless he already knows the answer to his question. He could just as informatively have said "it's complicated".
Ah, I think I may see the missed connection! It's like a jigsaw puzzle because archaeologists really do assemble fragments of old scripts. Sometimes the translation efforts can only give you probabilistic answers that in turn influence where you're likely to place a fragment.
A family member of mine works in the space academically, and they really have giant catalogues with pictures of fragments, and they experiment with different arrangements and what they would mean to their translation efforts. Unfortunately I don't have a link. :/
EDIT: a random CS paper that talks about automated solutions to the pure assembly part of this (without the text translation): https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.10553
