This article introduces the field of alternative archaeology. After a short presentation of how the field has been received by professional archaeologists, different ways of defining it are discussed, and potential demarcations are examined. A survey of the most frequently discussed topics follows, together with a discussion of the methodologies employed and the theoretical presuppositions accepted by writers in the alternative archaeology genre, and how these differ from the methods and theories of conventional academic archaeology. A brief section on the relevance of alternative archaeology to the study of religion concludes the article.