Biographies of Mission

Processes of missionization are intimately connected with broader histories of colonialism, conquest and culture change. The spread of Christianity in the modern era was a global process but, like all global processes, it was also uniquely local, involving idiosyncratic encounters between missionaries and their prospective ‘flocks’. Within the vagaries of these local contexts archaeological approaches offer unparalleled opportunities to explore the distinctive formulations of religious, philosophical, political, economic and personal visions and the ways in which they were materially encoded, enabled and contradicted. This session explores the missionary endeavour within an explicitly biographical framework that encompasses objects, landscapes and people and the ways in which they are socially networked and memorialised.