Chapter Sepulcros, iglesias y construcción de paisajes políticos en la Galicia de los siglos IX-XI

Abstract

Through the combination of two vast databases on archaeological and textual evidence on early medieval funerary and ecclesiastical sites in Galicia, this paper aims to explore the socio-political landscape dynamics around local powers conformed by small proprietary churches or monasteries with privileged anthropomorphic burials and, related with them, the first parish cemeteries. This new approach shed light on a huge group of local elites that from the 9th to the 11th centuries AD founded and controlled churches in which they would be buried in. This important amount of sarcophagus and rock-cut burials are often the only remain that we have from these social groups, while most of the early medieval written sources refer to the wider regional aristocracies that absorbed the former. The use of both databases allows us to understand the ways, pacific or problematic, of integration of these centres of local power into the aristocratic circle that supported the political structure of the Astur-Leonese kingdom, and ultimately, the creation of a series of relationships that define the early medieval political landscapes in the north-western part of the Iberian Peninsula.