In this, our final analytical chapter, we turn to a domain that prehistorians have always approached with caution, as in Hawkes' famous “ladder of inference” (Hawkes 1954). Cosmogony, religious beliefs, and the ritual practices of ancient societies may be inferred by archaeologists on the basis of textual or visual materials where these are available (usually only fully in the case of “state” level societies, and minimally in visual terms for the upper Palaeolithic), or from the remains of ceremonial or ritual facilities and precincts (temples, shrines, funerary remains, and so forth). For Ancestral Polynesia we have no such witnesses; the evidence of archaeology is for the present entirely mute. There are no extant Ancestral Polynesian temples or shrines, nor do we have funerary remains that might yield clues to ritual practice. No transparently sacred or ritual paraphernalia have been excavated from sites of this period. If asked to attempt a reconstruction of Ancestral Polynesian religion strictly on the basis of archaeological indications, we should have to reply that the task is currently impossible, and likely to remain intractable.