The Cross in the North: Pictish Christianization in Light of the Northern European Experience

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Christianization in Northern Europe’s first millennium CE has been intensively studied by numerous disciplines and is often viewed as a cause or outcome of social, political, and economic changes. Christianity arrived at different times through differing processes, far better understood in some areas—e.g., Scandinavia—compared to Scotland, where it arrived during Pictish ascendency in the region. As elsewhere, hagiographies shed some dim light from the proselytizing perspective, but their reception by the indigenous Picts and the impacts on their society remain opaque; the Christianized Picts were displaced by later groups, and thus there is no continuous protohistoric to early historic tradition preserved. Given the archaeological evidence of local and long-distance interactions between the Picts and their contemporaries in Ireland, England, Scandinavia, and the Continent, we examine several Christianized Pictish sites to ask how religious change in neighboring areas might inform research questions and hypotheses about possible developments in Pictland.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39387.0