ormation about status and state organization, about the practices of war, and about the culture's relationship with death.
The focus of much current archaeology is on the variations in approaches to death among various Andean peoples. The "competing models" of the life and death relationship "are firmly embedded in distinct social and cosmological (or philosophical) tradition" and archaeologists attempt to understand the operation of these systems (Dillehay, 1995, p. 19). The classic use of mortuary practice to draw conclusions about Andean sociopolitical organization was Dorothy Menzel's (1976) study of Ica ceramic burial goods. The Ica, provincial subjects of the Inca empire, employed several types of burial and Menzel sorted out the relationship between the types of burial goods and the elaboration of the ritual and the burial procedures to produce a model of Ica society. The differences in burials indicated the presence of two ranks of nobility, the nobility's servants, an administrative or civil servant class, and commoners. Menzel also
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