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The five books under review here explicitly call for archaeologists to place greater emphasis on agency and practice in understanding the role of religion and ritual in the ancient world. Four volumes, principally investigating Mississippian polities, draw our attention to the American midcontinent and its earthen monuments, magical plants, rock art, sacra, and sacred shrines. Although spanning a diversity of approaches and perspectives, the authors demonstrate how cosmograms, exotic objects, sacred landscapes, and transcendental beings articulate with people's daily lives and lived experiences. Each work offers an awareness of religion as expressed through materiality and the ways past belief systems were bundled, constituted, entangled, and intermeshed with agentive things, built landscapes, humans, natural environments, and other-than-human-persons. The fifth book, by Brian Hayden, contributes a significant approach to these ongoing discussions by stressing the importance of secret societies for interpreting and understanding the power of ritual in the ancient world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Secret societies (sodalities) integrated large sites in the Near Eastern Neolithic. • The study of complexity must distinguish status hierarchy from material inequality. • The study of complexity must distinguish between ethos and practice. • Ethos crosscuts hierarchy and inequality, shaping degree of egalitarian relations. • Autonomy of hierarchy, inequality, sodality, and ethos negates evolutionary stages. Attempts to address the socio-political organization of the early Neolithic mega-sites in southwestern Asia have generally been hampered by expectations derived from a view of socio-political evolution rooted in a binary opposition of egalitarianism and hierarchy. We propose that the egalitarianism-hierarchy dichotomy can be unpacked with reference to the distinction between ideology and practice. Both social relations can coexist, with egalitarian ideologies constraining hierarchical practices, producing seemingly egalitarian leadership despite hierarchical practices. We also propose that there were ceremonial sodalities in these early Neolithic societies and that sodalities can be effective agents of social control, exemplifying this interaction of ideology and practice. We argue that the existence of sodalities in any given society is independent of any political hierarchy as may or may not also exist and that the political role of sodalities is independent of the influence-authority distinction underlying step-wise socio-political evolutionary stages, invalidating such stages. Instead, we propose that there exist (reversible) threshold social conditions, only some contingently sequential, which falsely convey a sense of categorical evolutionary stages based solely on the presence of some threshold condition. The early Neolithic mega-sites illustrate the far broader spectrum and multidimensional range of possible sociopolitical organization produced by cultural evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]