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Archaeology is essential to the cross-cultural study of religion. Archaeologists’ focus on material evidence enables them to investigate groups not represented or underrepresented in textual traditions, including non-literate societies and non-elite members of literate societies. Accordingly, archaeology provides a broad comparative lens and longue durée perspective, as well as a means to study the practices of individuals across the social spectrum. Additionally, a disciplinary emphasis on material culture and human-thing relationships enables archaeologists to investigate the materiality of ancient religious traditions—the entanglement of ancient beliefs and practices within the material world. Because every stage of the archaeological process involves interpretation and theorization, archaeologists’ theoretical stances and methodological choices shape the data they obtain. For example, any discussion of the “archaeology of religion” will be shaped by the author’s (explicit or implicit) operational definition of “religion” itself (see Part I, “Considering ‘Religion’ and ‘Ritual’”). Modern Western constructions of “religion” involve culturally specific concepts that developed within particular historical contexts, and ancient people’s understandings of their beliefs, rituals, and objects may often have employed quite different analytical categories. Additionally, archaeological approaches to ancient religions have undergone significant transformation over the 20th and early 21st centuries (see Part II, “History of the Field”). In contrast to the “New Archaeology” of the 1960s–1970s, which portrayed religion as epiphenomenal and downplayed its significance as a primary generator of social change, late-20th-century movements brought renewed attention to ancient symbolism, ideology, and religion and encouraged scholars to seek methodologically rigorous ways to study ancient religion and ritual. The third section of the article (“Current Perspectives and Developments”) examines contemporary research on the archaeology of religion and analyzes the field’s intersections with, and importance to, broader interdisciplinary debates. Today, a proliferation of new scholarship on the archaeology of ancient religions explores the complex interactions between people, objects, and ideas in antiquity. Within the resulting range of new and ongoing developments, this article emphasizes (1) a productive engagement with the broader “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences; (2) a renewed emphasis on religion as a causal force for social change; and (3) an increasing focus on religion’s embeddedness within daily life, entailing the reconsideration of analytical categories such as “domestic cult,” “personal religion,” and “magic.” The contemporary archaeological study of ancient religions is a deeply multidisciplinary endeavor, frequently requiring archaeologists to engage with theories, methods, and specialists from fields that may include anthropology, religious studies, archaeometry, art history, philology, and more. Archaeologists not only generate empirical data about specific sites or cultures, but also investigate broader intellectual questions concerning the role of religion in society, the importance of material culture to religious experience, and the forms of agency wielded by both humans and objects. The archaeology of religion thus has important contributions to make to numerous subjects and debates throughout the humanities and social sciences.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s formative contributions to the study of Islam were made mostly in the mid- to late 20th century, beginning with the 1943 publication of his dissertation Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis in Lahore. His later achievements were integrated with his pedagogical and administrative innovations to the point that he influenced the study of Islam in North America by shaping his students and the settings in which they were educated as much as by his published works. All these efforts were informed by a larger mission: to foster recognition that the understanding of Islam in the past, present, and future required knowledge and awareness of the role it plays and has played in the hearts, minds, and lives of Muslims; to do justice to Islam by forging a critical and empathetic historical understanding of the Islamic tradition; and to create a new approach to the study of religion grounded in the difference between personal faith and cumulative tradition. Smith’s scholarly ethos was an outgrowth of his Weltaanschauung, the hallmark of which was what he referred to as participation in reality. One participated in reality, he suggested, through the loving exercise of reason and justice in the pursuit of truth. With respect to the study of Islam, truth was not to be mastered solely through the accumulation and interpretation of data but also through personal knowledge of and, ideally, friendship with modern Muslims. Smith was an all but uncategorizable figure, having been early on a materialist, Marxist, existentialist, Presbyterian minister and missionary, and later a rationalist thinker with conspicuous debts to German idealism and classical Greek metaphysics, as well as a visionary administrator and teacher of Islamic and comparative religious history.