Numerous anthropologists and sociologists have observed a correlation between different religious systems and socio-cultural complexity. This correlation seems to relate to the nature of ritual practitioners or specialists and the rites they perform.  Individual, part-time, shamanic-like practitioners are most often the exclusive ceremonialists within small-scale communities.  Larger, more hierarchically arranged communities tend to have full-time, institutionally trained and affiliated priests.   The thesis presented in this study is that the transformation of religious organization and ritual practitioners is one of the ways in which shifts in social complexity (and associated population aggregations) can take place.  Ritual communication, in effect, sustains inequality and aggregation.

In order to investigate diachronic changes in ritual practices, this study examines human burials and other archaeologically recovered remains of ritual behavior from four sites in the Casas Grandes region of northwestern Chihuahua.  As a result, conclusions are reached regarding the evolution of regional ritual practices and the manner in which this behavior contributed to both the over two hundred-year aggregation of people at the site of Paquimé during the Medio period and the concomitant development of social inequality. Further, it is suggested that the evolving complexity of prehistoric populations in the Casas Grandes region led to changes in religious practices and practitioners, and that these changes are reflected in mortuary ritual. Specifically, there does appear to be an increase in the symbolic display of status distinctions within Medio period burials.  However, there is also the development of new mortuary practices, burial forms, and other ceremonial acts that suggest a fundamental reorganization of ritual specialists and religious structure during this same period.