Until recently, the study of religion and ritual by archaeologists was typically found among those studying “world religions,” particularly those with the benefit of texts. Building upon a renewed interest in archaeological explorations of ancient religion and sacred ritual, the authors in this volume construct new understandings of the material forms of religion through the combination of multiple perspectives and differing methodological approaches. By using a variety of strategies applied to widely divergent regions and time periods, these scholars demonstrate how the archaeological study of ancient religion and ritual is methodologically and theoretically valid.

In early large-scale polities religion played a critical role in giving conceptual form to new rules that trump social and economic principles of kinship and egalitarian reciprocity in order to justify the existence of privileged elites. How does one both do theoretical justice to the insidiousness of a religion used in service to the state and do justice to conviction in local knowledge and the efficaciousness of belief therein? These are important matters for middle-range theory in the archaeology of religion. This contribution focuses on the latter half of the conundrum understood from contemporary ethnographic work by the author in the central highlands of Madagascar. It then examines the crafting of state religion during the unification and expansion of the Merina state under the reign of Andrianampoinimerina (1787–1810).

Over the past decade, many archaeologists have lamented over the parlous state of what is often labeled the “archaeology of religion.” Although much of the problem with the development of a satisfying approach to the study of religion in the past lies with religion itself, a notoriously difficult concept with a plethora of definitions, archaeologists themselves must acknowledge that they too bear responsibility for this unsatisfactory situation. Archaeologists have turned to the analysis of ritual in the past because it is easier to see ritual in the archaeological record than religion. But the result has been the creation of a corpus of disembodied ritual that may not fully capture the essential role that religion played in the past as a force for conservatism, transformation, or both. In this essay I argue that religion be reintroduced into the field by reminding archaeologists of what religion does. I illustrate how this can be accomplished within a program of philosophical pragmatism and an examination of contexts, contrasts, and combinations of archaeological data using two case studies.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the 1990s among the Pangwa and Fipa peoples in southwestern Tanzania, this discussion focuses on the locally constructed collective and individual perceptions of technological processes in iron smelting and how these are connected to imagination. Of particular interest is the largely neglected aspect of morality involved in the rituals surrounding iron working. It is argued that aspects of morality, as well as magic and witchcraft, explain the concerns of the people engaged in the complex technology of making iron far better than does fertility symbolism.

The mystery cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace offers productive material for theory building with respect to the archaeology of secrecy in ritual contexts. The social practice of secrecy builds political power and relies on communicative strategies that simultaneously conceal and reveal, employing culturally specific codes involving abstraction, ambiguity, metaphor, and allusion. Samothrace increased its secrecy as it grew in prestige: archaeological materialization of this secrecy includes euphemistic inscriptions and magnetized iron rings used as tokens of initiation. The rings use myth, philosophy, and ritual practice to communicate the initiate's status while emphasizing the rites’ resistance to disclosure.

Max Weber's concept of routinization offers a useful framework for understanding the relationship between political economy and the organization of religious movements. Here, we apply this concept to a comparison of Hopewell and Mississippian, two of the most important religious movements in the precolonial Eastern Woodlands. We focus on two archaeological contexts in particular—Mound 25 at the Hopewell site and Mound C at Etowah—to illustrate how Weber's concept allows for a more nuanced comparison than concepts associated with a more traditional neoevolutionary logic.

The serendipity of discovery can determine the process and progress of the archaeological interpretation of religious belief and ritual practice. The Chalcolithic period (4500–3600 B.C.E.) of the southern Levant is used as a case study. Had the material expressions of Chalcolithic religion been discovered in a different sequence, our understanding of that religion might have been distinctly altered. We first present a chronological narrative of discovery, with summary headlines, and then proceed to dismantle previous syntheses. Finally, we construct our own framework for understanding Chalcolithic religion, which is essentially a life-cycle religion with extensive, almost ever-present, ritual reference to death and the regeneration of life.

In this chapter, imagery on Ulúa marble vases from the lower Ulúa Valley of Honduras is explored from the perspective of conceptual landscapes and place-making at Travesía. I argue that the color of the stone—white marble—and the associated iconography are related to localized understandings of paradisical ancestral spheres. The portable nature of Ulúa marble vases enabled this spiritual realm to be presented during social and political events in the region and abroad in both lower Central America and the central Maya lowlands.

This chapter reevaluates theories and methodologies applied to the archaeology of religion stressing the symbolic meaningfulness of material culture, place, and landscape. In a case study—the Neolithic circular enclosure of Goseck in Germany—a contextual approach is used to highlight that ritual practices function both at a community and at an individual level, and as social and communicative acts. The chapter also demonstrates that ritual practice ought to be contextualized with the material culture and the place associated with it in order to better understand and theorize its complex meaning in prehistoric religious life.

Comprehending pure symbols generally requires arbitrary culture-specific knowledge. Messages communicated by means of signs with nonsymbolic dimensions, such as indexical symbols and indexical icons, should thus be of particular interest to archaeologists. I demonstrate how site design and communal ritual function as multiplex sign production to materialize religious and social statements at ethnographic Balinese Hindu temples. I apply the semiotic tools thus developed to Gunung Kawi, where nine nearly identical candi (temple building) facades were carved into cliffs beside a Balinese river around the 11th century C.E. Scale-based indices show the importance attached to the meanings of the candis, and their similarity and mutual proximity suggest that alliance (as well as inequality) was important to the builders’ construction of power. This interpretation, initially built by examining indexical and iconic meanings, is buttressed by examination of inscriptions and by comparisons to earlier Javanese and (again) later Balinese temples.

Artifacts deemed to have played a religious or ritual role in past societies belong to a broader analytical category of “symbolic” material culture. This chapter explores a new approach to such material culture, in which each symbolic object is understood as a “once-occurrent” dialogic interaction involving (1) coded cultural content, (2) particular material and contextual attributes, and (3) a situated synthesizing human perspective. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin among others, an embodied semiotic approach to symbolic objects is outlined, which identifies the constitution of the object not in its elusive past meaning but in the unique and dynamic relationship of its component parts. This approach positions the human actor not merely as an external evaluator of the object but as a fundamental element of its very definition. Discussion of a group of seal stones from Bronze Age Crete illustrates these ideas.

Archaeology understands religion from embodied practices; interrogates the role of materiality in the reproduction of religion, accomplished in ritual; and explores what historical perspectives tell us about how religions persist and change. Archaeology is specially prepared to examine the repetition of practices over time, and their mediation through material forms. Embodied practices, routinized, unquestioned, yet subject to recognition and approval as “right,” are the core of religion in action, or ritual. A pragmatic archaeological approach asks not what religion is, but what it does, and how the material and historical basis of archaeology might change our view of religion.