Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES)

早期基督教教堂和风景(ECCLILES)是一个研究项目，专注于1100年前在威尔士、爱尔兰、苏格兰和英格兰建立的基督教教堂。它汇集了历史学家、考古学家、艺术历史学家和地名专家，以确定这些教堂的不同类型的证据。它的目的是更全面地了解这些教堂的性质、位置、分布和景观环境。最终，它将建立一个包含国家证据数据库的网站，允许用户搜索和绘制证据地图。该项目意义重大，因为教会在经济、社会、文化和政治变革中发挥了核心作用。基督教是一种全球信仰，但它是在当地实践的：教堂一直是当地基督教身份构建的地方，作为全球信仰与当地经济、社会、文化和政治条件相互作用的方面。基督教崇拜涉及社区参与。因此，教堂也是当地社区成员相互炫耀自己的经济财富或社会地位的地方，或者是尺子寻求对这些社区施加权力的地方。由于教会在当地社会中的作用，它们经常获得土地来支持神职人员的工作，并从当地社区成员那里获得礼物，使它们变得异常富有和长寿。这使得教堂成为当地定居点的焦点，并推动经济发展。其结果是，教堂总是提供它们所在地方社区历史的关键证据。尽管这些教堂对学术研究人员和当地社区具有重要意义，但我们对1100年前威尔士、爱尔兰、苏格兰和英格兰的基督教教堂的了解是不完整的。只有从大约1100年开始，我们关于各种教堂的证据才变得更加普遍，这是由于改革后修道院的建立，当地教堂的巨大重建，以及教区和教区记录的开始。首先，没有关于1100年之前建立的教会的不同类型证据的全面目录，所以我们不知道曾经存在过多少教会。第二，虽然我们知道早期基督教教会的证据存在地区差异，但我们不知道这是否反映了教会的原始分布，或者是由于现有证据类型的差异或在中间时期证据的破坏。第三，在1100年之前的时期，威尔士、爱尔兰、苏格兰和英格兰等现代国家还不存在，但关于教堂的证据往往是根据这些现代的国家边界进行的不适当的研究。第四，这些教堂的证据通常由遗产机构、教会机构或慈善机构保管，但没有公开可获得的资源来识别这些证据，发现其重要性，或就如何保存或向公众展示它征求意见。ECCLES将补救这些问题。它将汇集来自威尔士、爱尔兰、苏格兰和英格兰的学者，以确定应该记录哪些证据。它将把那些关心证据的团体的代表聚集在一起，看看他们想知道什么。因此，它将设计一个合适的网站和数据库，使每个有兴趣照看我们早期基督教教堂的人都能获得这些证据。

Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES) is a research project focused on Christian churches established in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England before 1100. It brings together historians, archaeologists, art historians, and experts on place-names to identify the different types of evidence for those churches. It aims to produce a more comprehensive picture of the nature, location, distribution, and landscape settings of those churches. Ultimately, it will produce a website housing national databases of the evidence, allowing users to search and map that evidence.The project is significant because churches have played a central role in economic, social, cultural, and political change. Christianity is a global faith, but it is practised locally: churches have always been places where local Christian identities were constructed as aspects of that global faith interacted with local economic, social, cultural, and political conditions. Christian worship has involved communal participation. Churches have therefore also been places where members of local communities could show off their economic wealth or social standing to one another, or where rulers could seek to exert power over those communities. Thanks to their roles in local society, churches have often received land to support the work of the clergy and gifts from members of the local community, making them unusually wealthy and long-lived institutions. This has enabled churches to become the focus for local settlements and to drive economic development. The result is that churches always present key evidence for the history of the local communities within which they were located.Despite the significance of these churches to academic researchers and to local communities, our knowledge of Christian churches in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England before 1100 is incomplete. It is only from about 1100 onwards that our evidence for churches of all kinds becomes more common, as a result of the foundation of reformed monasteries, the great rebuilding of local churches, and the inception of diocesan and parish records. First, there is no comprehensive catalogue of the different types of evidence for churches established before 1100, so we do not know how many churches once existed. Second, though we know that there are regional variations in the evidence for early Christian churches, we do not know whether this reflects the original distribution of churches or is down to differences in the types of evidence available or the destruction of evidence in intervening periods. Third, in the period before 1100 the modern nations of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England did not exist, but the evidence for churches is often inappropriately researched according to those modern national boundaries. Fourth, the evidence for those churches is usually under the care of heritage agencies, ecclesiastical bodies, or charities, but there is no publicly accessible resource where they can identify that evidence, discover its significance, or obtain advice about preserving it or presenting it to the public.ECCLES will remedy these problems. It will bring together academics from Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England to establish what evidence should be recorded. It will bring together representatives from those groups who care for that evidence to see what they would like to know. It will thereby design a suitable website and databases to make that evidence available to everyone with an interest in looking after our early Christian churches.