This course offers an intensive study of archaeological approaches to ritual, religion, and ideology within a comparative historical framework. Students will examine key theoretical paradigms in the anthropology of religion while assessing the ways in which inferences on social process, identity politics, and prehistoric worldviews can be derived from ritual contexts preserved in the material record. We will critically evaluate archaeological methods employed to identify the physical traces of ritual practice and will scrutinize in turn competing theories of past ceremonialism. Other themes to be addressed in the course include: a critique of functionalist interpretations of religion popular in archaeological research; the materiality of ritual performance and the aesthetics of religious spectacles; and archaeological analyses of ritual deposits/landscapes to reconstruct past ontologies, power relations, historical change, and culturally specific structures of practice.