ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a behavioral alternative, which focuses specifically on ritual practices and deposits, which draws on formation processes, performance characteristics, and the life history model. Ritual and religion have been studied by anthropologists since the inception of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. Structural and functional approaches in the early twentieth century avoided the progressivist views of evolutionists, and analyzed religion as part of a larger social system. Throughout the history of American archaeology, ritual and religion have largely been ignored. Culture historians and processual archaeologists traditionally concentrated on other aspects of past societies. In behavioral archaeology, ritual objects are defined "neither by their charged symbolic meanings nor by their lack of utilitarian function". The chapter concludes with an overview of behavioral studies of ritual and religion.
