From the 10th c. onwards, new polities emerged on the periphery of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE), the new centre of Christendom. Endowing Christianity as an institutional system was integral to the emperor’s power, expanding his influence and securing his rule in the new kingdoms. Previous narratives have been generally constructed on the basis of limited written accounts, which mainly concern the higher echelons of society, emphasising the role of secular and ecclesiastical elites. However, the ecclesiastical and secular administrative organisation of the rural population could not be reconstructed satisfactorily from these sources, despite their importance for the stability of both State and Church.
The present poster introduces the ERC StG RELIC (Modelling Religiopolitics. The Imperium Christianum via its Commoners), which proposes a complex, comparative analysis and contextualisation of archaeological and historical remains of the rural population living on the eastern fringes of the later HRE during the Ottonian and Salian periods (10th -12th c.), exploring the influences of centres and networks of secular and ecclesiastical lords, of the natural environment, and of the economic infrastructure. Investigating this often-overlooked segment of the population, its hitherto unexplored or neglected role allows us to study how (top-level) changes in political and ecclesiastical organisations can be reflected in the evidence concerning the lower levels of society and of the local church network; how different strategies worked in different political settings, and what role local initiatives/agencies could have played in religious and political shifts. The archaeology of Christianisation frequently focuses on one crucial aspect i.e. the division of pagan and Christian elements, based predominantly on cemetery types and some aspects of the material culture. The spatial contextualisation of the burial customs and material remains, especially their comparative and large-scale analysis, could potentially bring new narratives about the pagan-Christian transition and the phenomenon of transitional cemeteries.
The project uses the OpenAtlas (https://openatlas.eu) framework to conduct this analysis, with respect to particular characteristics of object types and burial customs that are relevant to Christianisation (https://openatlas.eu, https://thanados.net). In the OpenAtlas framework, the data entry is directly mapped into predefined networks following the International Council of Museums’ Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM). The model allows compatibility with different large datasets and easy dissemination to the public, also providing built-in features for fundamental statistical analysis. The system also allows the exportation of data, which can be further analysed in already existing systems that provide more possibilities for sophisticated analysis, such as diverse GIS programmes or R framework. Proximity, network, and catchment analysis will be conducted on the site level. Based on the results of the proof of concept research, the relation of the early church network to the landscape and to the early centres and power structures will be investigated by reconstructing ‘areas of influence’ of the early church network, based on factors (environmental, political, social) influencing their site selection. The spatial contextualisation of the – primarily archaeological – results creates a unique narrative concerning spatial dynamics characterising the religious organisation of commoners, which can be compared to existing historical and archaeological theories concerning the role of central power and the circumstances the rural population and the local church network played a part in the stabilisation of Christianity.
RELIC’s innovation is supplementing large-scale spatial-quantitative analysis of site level historical, art historical and archaeological data with in-depth qualitative comparative analysis of thoroughly-researched and published churchyard cemeteries. The spatial-comparative approach will identify the spatial configuration of social and religious networks of institutionalised Christianisation, and this spatiality will be interpreted also as a proxy to the chronology of the process – of adaptation and expansion, beyond the point of view of the elites exposed in the chronicle tradition. Different regional patterns will point to different dynamics, hinting at the respective causes, for example, different levels of influence of the Church and the secular state, the problems of centralised coordination, of gradual or rapid expansions, how this process potentially influenced the later reorganisation of social structures, of settlement networks and their nucleation processes. The comparative model of archaeological and historical data will contribute to a better understanding of rural society and its adaptation to the new social and religious systems and offer a ‘view from below’ on major political and religious processes.
The present paper proposes to introduce RELIC as a methodological model that can be applied to other areas of historical studies with thematic questions, especially fields where traditional historical evidence is lacking. The project is developing a digital database of features connected to Christianisation, and the present paper showcases the upsides and challenges of the extensive, digital, geospatial database.