Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES)

早期基督教教堂和景观（ECCLES）是一个研究项目，重点研究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。它的目的是对这些教堂的性质、位置、分布和景观设置有一个更全面的了解。最终，它将建立一个网站，容纳证据的国家数据库，允许用户搜索和绘制证据。这个项目意义重大，因为教会在经济、社会、文化和政治变革中发挥了核心作用。基督教是一种全球性的信仰，但它是在当地实践的：教堂一直是构建当地基督徒身份的地方，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。基督教的敬拜涉及到集体参与。因此，教堂也是当地社区成员相互炫耀经济财富或社会地位的地方，也是统治者寻求对这些社区施加权力的地方。由于教会在当地社会中所扮演的角色，它们经常得到土地，以支持神职人员的工作，并从当地社区成员那里得到礼物，使它们成为异常富有和长寿的机构。这使得教堂成为当地聚落的焦点，并推动经济发展。其结果是，教堂总是为其所在的当地社区的历史提供关键证据。尽管这些教堂对学术研究人员和当地社区意义重大，但我们对1100年前威尔士、爱尔兰、苏格兰和英格兰基督教会的了解并不完整。从1100年开始，各种教堂的证据才变得更加普遍，这是由于修道院改革的基础，地方教堂的大规模重建，以及教区和教区记录的开始。首先，没有关于公元1100年之前建立的教堂的各种证据的综合目录，所以我们不知道有多少教堂曾经存在过。其次，虽然我们知道早期基督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，还是由于现有证据类型的差异，或者在中间时期证据的破坏。第三，在公元1100年之前，威尔士、爱尔兰、苏格兰和英格兰等现代国家并不存在，但教会存在的证据往往是根据这些现代国家边界进行的不恰当的研究。第四，这些教堂的证据通常由遗产机构、教会团体或慈善机构保管，但没有公共资源可以让他们识别这些证据，发现其重要性，或获得有关保存或向公众展示这些证据的建议。ECCLES将弥补这些问题。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，使每个有兴趣照顾我们早期基督教教会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.