Exploring the landscape dimension of the early medieval churches. A case study from A Mariña region (north-west Spain)

ABSTRACT

Despite the long tradition of studies on early medieval churches, little is still known about the reasons behind the selection of specific places for building churches between the fifth to tenth centuries a.d. Thanks to some rich historical documents, the region of A Mariña (Galicia, north-west Iberia) represents an exceptional case study in order to analyse the spatial logic behind the creation of the early medieval ecclesiastical landscapes. This objective is pursued by means of the application of GIS and spatial statistics for the study of the locational patterns of these first Christian buildings. As this is a first attempt, we started from the formal analysis of topographic variables; then a settlement model for the churches was defined, and next used to analyse specific trends on their locational dynamics. The results allow us to propose that the location of the early medieval churches should be related to visual and territorial control over some specific areas of the landscape (mainly settlements and natural resources). This suggests that, despite the variety of church founders, some kind of collective planning of the church network did happen during the early Middle Ages. This fact can be historically explained as a key part of power strategies aimed at the creation of a new territorial articulation during this period.

Keywords:

• Early medieval churches
• predictive model
• ecclesiastical landscapes
• locational dynamics
• Galicia

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the project TERPOMED funded by a ‘Xunta de Galicia, Consolidación e Estructuración, modalidade D: Proxectos de Excelencia’ grant (call 2016). David Espinosa-Espinosa and Miguel Carrero-Pazos are funded by the Postdoctoral Plan I2C-Xunta de Galicia. The authors are grateful to Alejandro Güimil for some developments concerning the land-use analysis.

All the analytical approaches were carried out using GRASS GIS in the versions 7.0.2 and 7.4.0 (GRASS Development Team 2015) and the R statistical environment (R Development Core Team 2008, especially the spatstat package (Baddeley, Rubak & Turner 2016).

Notes

1 The total number of churches given by the king is twenty-four, but two of them lie outside our study area.

2. These are: Sancti Martini de Sperautano -mentioned in the ‘King Silo’s charter’ from 775 (Ruiz-Asencio 1987, doc. 1), and then in a charter from Lourenzá (Rodríguez-González 1992, doc. 9), Sancti Iohanni de Vallebrui (Rodríguez-González 1992, doc. 9), Sancte Eolalie in Ermolfi (Saez & Saez 1996, doc. 35 and Cal 1999, doc. 6), Sancte Marie in Triauada (Rodríguez- González 1992, doc. 1–2) and Sancti Iusti in Cabarcos (Rodríguez-González 1992, doc. 1–2 and 9).

3 In addition to these, there are other five churches located outside our study area.

4 Sancti Georgii in Laurenzana (Rodríguez-González 1992, doc. 9), Sancti Stephani in Auriam (Rodríguez- González 1992, doc. 9), Sancta Maria in Triuada (Ruiz-Asencio 1987, doc. 40), Sancti Iusti in Cavarcos (Ruiz-Asencio 1987, doc. 40) and Sancto Adriano in Laurentiana (Saez & Saez 1996, doc 40).

5 http://www.ign.es/web/ign/portal.