Mapping the Anglo-Saxon Conversion: GIS and Understanding Early Medieval Lived Religion

This paper explores the spatial location of burial sites and Christian foundations to argue that mapping the material remains of the dead can challenge and complicate our understanding of the lived religious experiences of fifth- through tenth-century inhabitants of England, whose lives (outside the religious and secular elites) are not recorded in our few surviving textual sources.  Our major extant historical account of these centuries, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (written in c. 731 CE), suggests a major break between the pagan ways of the early Anglo-Saxons and the adoption of Christianity beginning in the sixth century.  Scholars have traditionally viewed the archaeological evidence from Anglo-Saxon cemeteries as indicating a coterminous break in attitudes toward the dead, since simple burials aligned to the east largely replaced the practices of cremation and burying with elaborate grave goods by the year 700 CE.  I argue, however, that mapping the locations of cemeteries and religious foundations can reveal a more continuous picture of religious adaptation and change, due to the long-standing influence the local landscape could have on the burial practices of past populations.  Spatial analysis in GIS allows us to visualize the consistent influence of “the topography that shapes communities over the turn of generations,” to borrow Nicholas Howe’s phrase.  For example, calculating viewsheds from cemetery sites situated adjacent to navigable rivers and sea coasts suggest that water could have religious significance for the mourners who chose to bury their loved ones in such locations, both before and after conversation to Christianity.  And at the village of Adwick-le-Street in South Yorkshire, the slope of the local topography helps to explain why burials share a consistent SW-NE orientation in the landscape from pagan times to today.