A Geospatial Approach to Modelling Social, Religious and Political Shifts in History

The present paper introduces the project RELIC (Modelling Religiopolitics. The Imperium Christianum via its Commoners), conducted at the University of Vienna, and the Natural History Museum Vienna, funded by the European Research Council, highlighting the main potential in research and describing the project’s methodology. RELIC proposes a complex, comparative analysis and contextualisation of archaeological and historical remains of the rural population living on the eastern fringes of the later Holy Roman Empire 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 and 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 contextualization of burial customs and material remains, particularly through comparative and large-scale analysis, has the potential to reveal new narratives about the pagan-Christian transition and the phenomenon of transitional cemeteries.