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.