In societies without significant social differentiation, burial assemblages tend to be relatively uniform, reflecting the broadly similar social status of individuals.

In societies with meaningful social differentiation — where some individuals or families have higher status, greater access to resources, and greater capacity to mobilize the labor and materials of others — burial assemblages tend to vary, with high-status individuals receiving more elaborate treatment and more valuable grave goods.

The Anzick burial, with its extraordinary concentration of Clovis technological wealth, is consistent with an interpretation in which the child’s family or social group was among those with the highest status in Clovis society.

The ability to deposit the equivalent of what might represent a significant fraction of a group’s technological wealth with a deceased child — essentially sacrificing economically important objects in a mortuary ritual — implies a group with sufficient economic capacity to absorb that sacrifice.