This does not necessarily mean that Clovis society was rigidly stratified in the way that later agricultural and state-level societies tend to be.

Mobile hunter-gatherers typically have more egalitarian social structures than sedentary agriculturalists, because the necessity of carrying everything on one’s back limits the accumulation of material wealth, and because the need for social cooperation in mobile environments tends to equalize resource distribution.

But even among mobile hunter-gatherers, there are typically some forms of social differentiation — based on skill, experience, kinship, or other factors — that are expressed in mortuary contexts.

The Anzick burial suggests that Clovis society had developed some forms of inherited or ascribed status — social standing that derived from birth into a particular family or lineage rather than from personal achievement.