Abstract
We provide a detailed treatment of the Camassa-Holm (CH) hierarchy with special emphasis on its algebro-geometric solutions. In analogy to other completely integrable hierarchies of soliton equations such as the KdV or AKNS hierarchies, the CH hierarchy is recursively constructed by means of a basic polynomial formalism invoking a spectral parameter. Moreover, we study Dubrovin-type equations for auxiliary divisors and associated trace formulas, consider the corresponding algebro-geometric initial value problem, and derive the theta function representations of algebro-geometric solutions of the CH hierarchy.