Hawkes' ladder of inference is an archaeological argument outlined by Christopher Hawkes in a 1954 paper that describes increasing difficulty of making inferences about ancient society with artifacts.
Hawkes argued that it was easiest to infer how artifacts were made and hardest to describe the religion of a society.
[1] Hawkes' proposed in his argument a ladder that has four "rungs" and described the increasing difficulty of making assumptions about ancient societies with archaeological data.
At the top of his ladder was the society's religion, which he argued to be "the hardest of all" to make inferences about.
[2][3][4] In 1998 Christopher Evans wrote in Antiquity that the "ladder" paper is "[a] key document in the history of 20th-century archaeology, citation to it is almost mandatory in any overview of the development of archaeological thought and it often serves as a 'windmill' to be tilted at when marshalling theoretical argument.