Transforming heaven and earth: local communities and the end of life in the conversion to Christianity in east-central Sweden (950-1250 CE)

This project aims to understand how local communities at the end of the Viking Age responded and contributed to the radical socio-religious transformations brought about by the conversion to Christianity.

It will study the diverse ways families and communities took care of their dead through funerary rituals and monuments and how changes in their practices enabled the reconceptualization of life and death.

Transformation will be traced from the microbiology of buried individuals to collective action that shaped the spiritual and commemorative landscape.The project shifts focus from simple causal models, where Christianisation has primarily been seen as an elite-controlled process, to the perspective of local communities as they adopted - or resisted - new ways and values.

The study material is from regions of east-central Sweden where old and new aspects of mortuary customs were practised side by side over a long period (c. 950-1250 AD).

Over 4-years the team will combine their skills in archaeology, osteology and archaeothanatology with biomolecular methods in an integrated approach designed to trace divergent drivers and experiences of change, deepening knowledge of how everyday actions, accumulated over time, shape major transformations.The project will result in a nuanced synthesis of the diversity and chronology of change and a more multifaceted picture of Christianisation, central to understanding how religious and social structures took shape in the Middle Ages.