Social inference and mortuary practices: An experiment in numerical classification

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Abstract
Recent cross‐cultural studies of ethnographically recorded mortuary procedures indicate that variations in the form of mortuary ritual symbolize and reflect the membership of the deceased in the components of a social system. Such formal patterns of burial procedure can best be identified archaeologically through the numerical classification of mortuary attributes. A general interpretive orientation towards the study of mortuary practices is developed in this paper as a basis for testing the relative utility of average‐ and complete‐linkage cluster‐analyses, fact‐analysis, and monothetic division using the sum of chi‐squares and the information statistic, for the classification of mortuary data. The results of this experiment indicate that classification with the information statistic is most suitable for analysis of thesocial dimensions of mortuary practices: