Archaeologists should broaden their study of assimilation to include processes other than acculturation, merely one aspect of the assimilation process and not the most significant. In particular, structural assimilation should become the focus of our research. To do this, new methods are needed to archaeologically explore a number of sociological processes not easily revealed in patterns of material culture. In this article we suggest one way of doing so and present a case study with mortuary data from the Masonic Cemetery in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We conclude that structural assimilation is difficult but not impossible to observe from an archaeological perspective.
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