Maybe we're mostly in agreement? I certainly agree that ancient people were very similar to us, and that religion can have value by transmitting knowledge. But religions, almost any social meme complex, tend to have a lot of nonsense closely entwined with the beneficial payload. So when people act it out as a whole, it can have some really goofy side effects, like cathedrals (the details of what's inside, if not the brute fact of its location). You can't treat the ritual separate from its practical implications, because in the minds of people they derive from the same logical source, and if you try to take just the parts you like you'll actually be acting inconsistently with your supposed beliefs. Separating the good from the bogus at scale apparently takes centuries at best.
I guess maybe you're saying we should try harder to find the economic purposes under the apparently ritual artifacts? Maybe. I'm honestly pretty sure that's assumed in practice. I bet if you talked to an archaeologist on the project and raised a similar point to your point about cathedrals, they would say something like "Hmm? Yes, of course it was something like that." But even if we get enough evidence to figure out the economic or political role these sites played, my guess is the religious or other ritual aspects will not go away.
As for our modern perspective, assuming that ancient people were superstitious is a completely natural extrapolation from watching ourselves, even if that's not where the assumption comes from in practice. Math is pretty solid, and the platonic ideal of science but science as practiced today too often is a ritual, or we wouldn't have all these replication crises and junk COVID papers.
We appear to be mostly in agreement, and specifially on the point that in practice archeologists probably necessarily do the exact economic analysis I'm advocating.
I suspect the friction point may be about whether the idea or meaning of a ritual is an encompassing abstraction for general social shared experience vs. a specific sub-category of experiences that I am saying requires sympathetic magic. My view ignores whether there are rituals that are not sympathetic magic, and I'd posit there aren't, and that ones that don't have it are are just habits. However, the exceptions others point out should show the limits to that heuristic as well.
Very much agree some science has been ritualized, which imo de-sciences it, and to me this discussion of our relationship to meaning is a really important idea at the root of this question. It's related to what we deal with as hackers, which is whether our abstractions are meaningful and powerful tools for illuminating complexity, or just a layer of obfuscating jargon.
A criticism I think we might agree on is crappy social science and theory papers are like a "Chinese Room," where the authors have taken opinions, transliterated them into something that gets published using some stats and p-hacking and formal methods, but it's as though they have never had "real" understanding of the subject or material, and the crossover is that this chinese room meets sympathetic magic pattern resembles the category of ritual I was describing.
"Ritual" in an anthropological context, the way I believe OP is using it, is a pretty broad term with no particular magic connotation (though I'd say "general social shared experience" is going too far). It seems to encompass e.g. burial practices, and our common celebrations of Christmas and Halloween would qualify as well. The definition in this cousin comment meshes with my understanding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29131502
I guess maybe you're saying we should try harder to find the economic purposes under the apparently ritual artifacts? Maybe. I'm honestly pretty sure that's assumed in practice. I bet if you talked to an archaeologist on the project and raised a similar point to your point about cathedrals, they would say something like "Hmm? Yes, of course it was something like that." But even if we get enough evidence to figure out the economic or political role these sites played, my guess is the religious or other ritual aspects will not go away.
As for our modern perspective, assuming that ancient people were superstitious is a completely natural extrapolation from watching ourselves, even if that's not where the assumption comes from in practice. Math is pretty solid, and the platonic ideal of science but science as practiced today too often is a ritual, or we wouldn't have all these replication crises and junk COVID papers.