Differentiated treatment of deviancy at death as revealed in anthropological and archeological material

Social deviancy has been observed among all groups by sociologists. To distinguish normal from deviant social personae in archeological material, a set of hypotheses has been formed and tested in ethnological examples of burial customs relating to social deviants. These hypotheses refer to the variety of the definitions of deviancy among different social groups, and to the dependence of the definition upon the type of evaluation elicited from the collective opinion of the group and upon the level of the social complexity of the group. Although there are a number of difficulties in testing these hypotheses in archeology, nevertheless there exist several archeological cases that would seem to confirm one of the hypotheses proposed in this paper.