The excavation of Mound C, at the Etowah site, near Cartersville, Georgia, revealed a series of burials which suggests social stratification within the resident population. The differences between burials in the mound and those within the village cemeteries is to be seen not only in the more elaborate goods which accompany the mound burials, but also in the fact that the mound burials are accompanied by goods made of exotic and rare materials. The duplication of certain kinds of materials with individuals who represent different age groups suggests that the costume and paraphernalia is symbolic of an office and does not reflect individual taste in ornamentation.

Formal analysis is employed to express symbolically the behavior associated with disposal of the dead in archaeological contexts. Key diagrams are shown to economically express the partitioning of attribute space by a series of variables coded on independently measured dimensions. The attention of this paper is to explicate the analysis of formal-structural relations among archaeological materials from Spiro, a specialized Mississippian period site in eastern Oklahoma, without resort to analogies between cultural-historical configurations. The power of the analysis is extended by direct comparison of the Spiro key with keys made on the same dimensions that are drawn from the ethnohistorical literature of two southeastern societies.

The explanations of burial customs provided by previous anthropologists are examined at length together with the assumptions and data orientations that lay behind them. Both the assumptions and explanations are shown to be inadequate from the point of view of systems theory and from a detailed examination of the empirical record. A cross-cultural survey drawn from the Human Relations Area Files shows that associations do exist between measures of mortuary ritual variety and structural complexity. It was found that both the number and specific forms of the dimensions of the social persona commonly recognized in mortuary ritual vary significantly with the organizational complexity of the society as measured by different forms of subsistence practice. Moreover, the forms that differentiations in mortuary ritual take vary significantly with the dimensions of the social persona symbolized. Hence, much of contemporary archaeological conjecture and interpretation regarding processes of cultural change, cultural differentiation, and the presence of specific burial customs is inadequate as well as the ideational propositions and assumptions underlying these notions. Inferences about the presumed “relationships” compared directly from trait lists obtaining among archaeological manifestations are useless without knowledge of the organizational properties of the pertinent cultural systems.

Analysis of differential distribution of mortuary artifacts from the major site units at Moundville and the Pickwick Reservoir in northern Alabama has yielded structural similarities and differences. The occurrence of certain classes of artifacts, symbolic of high status positions, is limited to a restricted number of individuals interred in platform mounds. These artifacts are not found with individuals buried in the cemeteries either at Moundville or in surrounding sites. In turn, within the cemeteries and platform mounds there is observed differentiation and regularity in and between classes of individuals in terms of skeletal orientation and mortuary treatment. The model suggested from the archaeological remains is one of a complexly ranked and functionally specialized politico-religious organization as part of this cultural system.

Assuming an individual's treatment at death is a reflection of the position occupied in a status system in life, and that differences between individual interments reflect the type of status system participated in (e.g., egalitarian versus ranked), the outlines of extinct status systems should be ascertainable. This paper will present the results of such an attempt using data collected from the mesolithic occupation and burial site of Wadi Haifa, northern Sudan. These data include age, sex, pathology, treatment of the body, and mode of interment. The evidence argues for an egalitarian status system with differences in disposal associated with differences in age, sex, and personal achievement. Differences in mortality rates are examined in light of constraints placed on hunting and gathering societies. There is also evidence of post-marital residence favoring the husband's agnates.

The spatial, temporal, and formal controls available in Colonial gravestones permit the investigation of the various social dimensions of their occurrences. Those aspects which can be studied include status, community intermarriage, the social implications of stylistic evolution, and, in the case of the cemeteries, relative importance of community as opposed to familial control of interment practices. Such studies provide an understanding of some of the social factors reflected by measurable data of the type encountered in archaeological research. This paper documents specific responses in the evolution of marker styles to the Great Awakening's effect at Boston.