2017 Rhind Lecture 1 "Sacred Values: Medieval Archaeology and Religious Heritage"

Thank you. It's an honour to be here and to be the 138th RIND lecturer, although I do have some reservations about the wisdom of giving six lectures in one weekend. My colleagues at Reading have been referring to this as the Iron Woman challenge in the last few months. I do feel reassured that 137 people before me have survived the experience of giving not less than six lectures in one weekend. My lecture this evening reflects on how archaeologists have engaged with the sacred, why and how sacred heritage matters. And my focus is on medieval Christian heritage, but this first lecture ranges broadly in space and time to place medieval sacred heritage in an international context. I'll pose the following questions. Why have archaeologists failed to engage critically with the sacred? How do we define sites of sacred heritage? On what basis do we value, conserve and interpret them? What is the value of secular heritage in an allegedly secular society? And finally, how can we re-engage medieval archaeology with the sacred to make it more meaningful to a range of audiences? I should begin by explaining my use of the term heritage, a label which has multiple meanings and connotations. Heritage refers in one sense to the fixed material legacy of the past, in this case the archaeology, material culture and landscapes of medieval belief. But it also refers to the contemporary use of this legacy for social, economic and political agendas, that is the use of the past to shape the present and the future. Increasingly, heritage focuses on people and how they interpret and interact with their worlds. This perspective of living heritage, as it's sometimes called, has developed rapidly following the adoption of the Pharaoh Convention by the Council of Europe in 2005. But the spiritual value of heritage comes to the fore in discussions of intangible heritage, which includes oral traditions, myths, performing arts, rituals, knowledge and skills. This concept of intangible heritage expands the definition of heritage to encompass non-Western understandings and has led to reflection on the inherent fragility of intangible heritage and the importance of local voices and communities in its protection. My opening premise in these lectures is that medieval archaeologists have not engaged sufficiently with the sacred, either the beliefs of medieval people or those of our audiences today. The intellectual tradition of archaeology privileges a secular position, even when we study the remains of religious sites and landscapes. And I would argue that this is not merely a methodological approach, but an implicit theoretical perspective. For example, the key textbooks of church and monastic archaeology focus on technology and economy, emphasizing engineering feats such as water management and milling. Churches are explored principally in terms of their building technology and chronological development. And there are, of course, exceptions, important exceptions to this rule, such as Thomas O'Carragan's work on social memory and early medieval churches in Ireland. From the 1970s onwards, monastic archaeology shifted away from the study of the ritual core of the church and cloister to focus on the productive and service areas of the inner and outer court. This represents a significant paradigm shift in which medieval archaeology consciously moved away from the study of religious belief and ritual. It was influenced by methodological innovations, such as the development of environmental and landscape archaeology, and this was important in providing a new intellectual space for medieval archaeology. The study of agricultural and industrial landscapes offered a distinctively materialist inquiry, revealing an aspect of medieval life that was not accessible through historical documents. So it was a good thing in many respects, but it resulted in a privileging of economic themes and the projection of secular values onto the study of medieval religious settlements. The tendency to frame religion in terms of economic and power relations is part of a wider intellectual tradition in western archaeology. Archaeological approaches to religion are characterized by a secularist position, one which pervades both the European archaeological tradition and the American anthropological school. Nevertheless, the last 20 years has seen a real explosion of archaeological interest in prehistoric religions. But when you look at this work, much of it actually deconstructs the concept of the sacred as a meaningful category. Some prehistorians propose universal definitions of religious that focus on symbolism and belief in the supernatural, while others reconceptualize religion as an aspect of everyday life, or a holistic worldview. They argue that there was no understanding of religion as a separate sphere of life in the past, and this is applied to societies ranging widely from prehistoric Europe to medieval Islam and pre-Columbian Central America. Many archaeologists completely reject the idea that people in the past were motivated by a concept of the numinous, and I think recent research on Stonehenge is a prime example of this, with interpretation framed in terms of the veneration of the ancestors rather than celebration of the divine. So how did archaeology as a discipline come to be dominated by secularist reasoning? Certainly its perspectives on religion are very different from those of historians, for example. A key turning point is said to be an essay by Christopher Hawkes, published in 1954, in which he set out the famous ladder of inference. His paper is often taken as a warning to archaeologists against straying into the sticky realms of ritual and belief, expectively excluding these areas from the legitimate questions to be addressed by archaeology. Hawkes's ladder had a major influence on how processional archaeologists in the 1970s approached religion and ritual. For example, burials were studied as social or economic markers rather than as ritual deposits. But Marxist perspectives had an even more pervasive influence on archaeology, beginning with the work of Veer Gordon Child and continuing through processional and post-processional perspectives to the present day. Archaeologists tend to frame religion in Marxist terms as superstructure and false ideology, structural mechanisms of social control that aim to maintain hegemonic power relations. Now, I'm not just throwing stones here because I would include myself in this stereotype. As an undergraduate, I was fascinated by Gordon Child and I chose the of Marxism for a special project in my final year. I think that's when they realised I was set for an academic career. And when I finished my undergraduate degree, I embarked on a PhD on gender in medieval archaeology. And this led inadvertently, purely by accident, to a focus on nunneries and a lifelong specialisation on the archaeology of belief. I didn't set out that way. But it was only towards the end of my PhD that I began to reflect on the spiritual beliefs and embodied experience of medieval religious women. And this insight didn't come from archaeology or academic engagement, but from an encounter with a contemporary community of enclosed nuns. Again, this was a somewhat accidental occurrence. It's because there are very few substantial surviving remains of medieval nunneries in Britain. And I was keen to visit the site of this one, Burnham in Buckinghamshire, which had some of its claustral buildings intact. And when I investigated this, I discovered that the ruins had been acquired by the Society of the Precious Blood in 1916. And an Anglican convent was established on the site. I wrote to the convent, as you did in those days before email, and discovered that I struck up a correspondence with one of the sisters who was herself very interested in archaeology. And she liked the idea of an archaeologist coming to visit her at Burnham. She agreed that I could come to visit under the terms of a religious retreat, which frightened me a little bit from my secularist perspective. So I chose to treat it as ethnographic fieldwork. I structured it to within an inch of its life. I observed services and interviewed the sisters on their perceptions of medieval sacred space and their use today of the convent's medieval spaces. But our discussions grew much more intense, with some of the sisters discussing their personal experiences of vocation and the sacred, and their family's reactions when they decided to become nuns. We spent a week talking and looking at the archaeology. And this episode, as I eventually realised years later, had a profound impact on my doctoral research. It inspired a focus on female agency, how women controlled their own lives, and the embodied experience of religious women. The experience of speaking with contemporary nuns about their vocation made me sensitive to the ethics involved in studying religion, both in living and in medieval communities. It instilled an enduring respect for the beliefs of others, even if I don't share them myself, and the genuine convictions by which they live their lives. This has shaped my research, particularly in relation to problematic categories of belief, such as magic. Archaeology's privileging of secular values is particularly evident when discussing magic, odd, or inexplicable deposits. We stigmatise ritual in the past by framing it as a fallacy, something considered as irrational. A classic example is the treatment of so-called structured deposition or placed deposits, such as whole pots or animals buried in ditches and pits, or objects placed at critical points in settlements, such as at boundaries, entrances, or the corners of houses. Such deposits are widely regarded by archaeologists as intentional acts that appear to defy any rational explanation. Joella Brook critically assessed the assumptions underlying these interpretations, arguing that a series of binaries was being projected, including secular, profane, rational, irrational, and western, non-western, and that these attitudes were rooted in the legitimising discourses of European colonialisation. She argues that we need to interpret structured deposition within a different framework of values. Placed deposits were rationally conceived according to past world views. They meant something to the people that made them. They were directed towards specific practical purposes, such as agriculture and technology. The attitude of medieval archaeologists towards such deposits reflects their privileging of secular and economic approaches. An instructive case is that of coins deposited in Scandinavian churches, with over 65,000 coin finds discovered below wooden floors in around 600 churches. A current interdisciplinary project based at the University of Oslo is examining these coin finds in the context of the relationship between the church and monetisation, focusing on the best recorded church excavations. But the question of whether these coins were deliberately deposited is still contested. Even the co-investigators of the Oslo project seem to disagree on whether these coins were intentionally placed or accidental losses, for example incorporated during processes of floor renewal or representing overflow from off-retrieve boxes. Once again, archaeologists project the secular, profane, rational, irrational framework when interpreting inexplicable deposits. But we have ample evidence for the medieval worldview incorporating a rich plurality of ritual practice performed as magic, and we have archaeological evidence for the ritual use of coins, for example placed with the medieval dead. So why is it so unlikely that medieval people were intentionally burying coins in churches? The historian of magic, Richard Kieckheffer, proposes that medieval magic should be perceived as an alternative form of rationality that was consistent with medieval views of the universe, a definition surprisingly close to Joanna Brooke's discussion of prehistoric placed deposits. The use of folklore has met similar resistance in archaeological circles, although there is growing interest in the use of folk belief to interpret ritual in post-medieval contexts. The folklore record of the Scottish Highlands in particular is particularly rich, dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries. But a critical approach needs to be taken to the sources which have been shaped by the interests and assumptions of folk collectors. Many of these collectors projected an assumption that pagan religions persisted into the modern period. Archaeologists use folklore to consider the integration of ritual into everyday life, such as the ritual use of objects, for instance old coins to protect against the evil eye, or metal objects to guard against fairies and witches. We should be cautious in making assumptions about the long-term continuity of belief, and in projecting evidence from these post-medieval sources back into the earlier periods. However, folklore does represent a unique source of evidence for social memory, with potential to enrich our interpretations of medieval belief. I want to go on now to consider the relationship between heritage and sacred sites, something which has received remarkably little critical reflection within archaeology. In contrast with the growing literature in anthropology, museum studies, architectural history, geography, and tourism studies. So how do we define sites of sacred heritage, and on what basis do we value, conserve, and interpret them? Sacred heritage sites are accorded high value internationally, indicated by the proportion awarded emblematic status as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Around 30 percent of the 1,000 sites on the World Heritage List can be classified as sacred sites. Landscapes and monuments defined as sacred heritage follow some common criteria cross-culturally, and I thought it might be useful to start with those. These are the major categories. Locations associated with the events in the life of a deity, saint, or prophet. Pilgrimage landscapes associated with healing. Locales associated with religious visions and miracles, and venues of special religious rituals. We also have tombs of saints, prophets, or founders. Shrines associated with relics or icons. Landscapes manifesting the mystical power of nature. Ancestral or mythical homes of the gods. And finally, places of remembrance that commemorate acts of great evil, such as Auschwitz. The concept of the sacred is culturally specific, but there is a common understanding of the sacred place as being set apart by virtue of its mystical association with the gods. Sacred heritage sites provide a material connection to the numinous, to mythical persona and supernatural realms. The distinctive character of sacred heritage resides in the intersection between the tangible and the intangible. Sacred heritage sites are physical manifestations of religious myths and mystical beliefs, a material place to reflect on the immaterial. They denote otherness and are separate from everyday life. But the concept of sacred heritage is not exclusively connected to religious sites or cult centres. We could consider battlefield sites as sacred heritage, particularly where they represent transformative episodes that shaped a nation's history, such as the Scottish battles of Bannockburn and Culloden. The conceptual status of a landscape is transformed by bloodshed and the mass sacrifice associated with war, so that battlefields sometimes take on the status of hallowed ground. Sites of so-called dark heritage, such as battlefields and concentration camps, provoke a pilgrimage response in which we travel to landscapes where blood was shed. These are landscapes of sacrifice and they represent notions of sacred space that resonate with both secular and religious values, evoking an emotional response that might be compared with a spiritual experience. Perceptions of authenticity also affect the conservation and use of heritage sites and objects. Heritage professionals have traditionally assessed authenticity on the basis of the quality of evidence according to academic criteria. The authenticity of archaeological sites is defined by values including real, true, original, innate, reliable and aura. The elusive quality of aura is that which distinguishes an original from a copy or a fake. But religious attitudes towards authenticity must also be taken into account when dealing with sacred heritage. A good example here is the Turin Shroud. Proposals to conserve this artifact have been resisted because it would alter the sacred aura of the object. Heritage approaches based on this idea of the classic idea of authenticity divorce monuments from their historical and human context, presenting them as sterile and abandoned, frozen in time. The ruined abbeys of medieval Britain are a prime example of this, presented as if fossilized in their landscape at the point of the dissolution in the 16th century. Living churches and cathedrals, those which we visit today, are also framed in terms of authenticity, viewed as unproblematic survivals of a living religion. So all the additions over time are masked by restorations that seem to represent a sense of timelessness. These spaces appear to embody seamless continuity and the stability of rituals and beliefs. But this belies centuries of social and religious change and even conflict acted out in the names of cathedrals. For example, during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century, the Anglican church was suppressed and many cathedrals were sieged and partially destroyed by the parliamentarians. We seldom see this in the interpretation of these sites. Conflict and change are masked by conservation interventions and heritage narratives that promote continuity. A controversial example is Cordoba Mosquita Cathedral, a complex sacred monument in Andalusia that has become a contested heritage site. This vast edifice is a unique hybrid of Moorish and Christian medieval architecture that draws over one and a half million visitors each year. The Moorish mosque was built from the late 8th to the 10th century and was converted to Christian use in 1236 by the Catholic conqueror Ferdinand III. In the 16th century, a cruciform church, I think you can see that very clearly, was built into the centre of the complex as an iconic Christian symbol implanted to convert Islamic space. The display and interpretation of the Mosquita represent its Christian history exclusively, drawing on archaeological evidence for an earlier Christian church on the site. Archaeological authenticity is used to claim continuity and the legitimacy of Christian use. There's no commentary on religious change, conflict or tolerance, despite the reputation of Islamic Spain as a multicultural society. In recent years, tensions have developed when Muslim visitors have attempted to pray in the cathedral, kneeling in front of the mihrab. In 2010, several were actually arrested and removed from the cathedral and charged with crimes against religious sentiment. The cathedral issued statements explaining that it's a Catholic church and it must not be used for prayers by other religions. This theme of conflict over ritual access is one that recurs at sacred heritage sites, alongside the tendency to present a single narrative of the dominant religion, even where the site is considered sacred to multiple denominations. This occurs in Britain too, it's not just something that we have to look to Andalusia for. Why do people visit sacred heritage sites and how do they experience them? What do they actually get out of them? Well, some of the most popular tourist attractions in Europe are sites of medieval Christianity, such as the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, which attracts nearly 14 million visitors per year. And I'm pleased to say that's four million more a year than Disneyland Paris. It's quite surprising, but quite pleasing. Many visitors to sacred heritage sites seek a sense of the numinous or an appreciation of the spirit of place. They quest for spiritual or imagined landscapes. So some explicitly seek a religious experience, while many others are interested more in religious heritage rather than spiritual belief. For many visitors to sacred heritage sites, personal experience is detached from any motive of lived religion and is more akin to heritage tourism. For these more secular minded people, the value of these sites lies in this idea of timelessness and immortality that these sites seem to convey. Religious sites are anchors of collective memory and a means for the non-religious to reconnect with the spiritual domain. Visitors to living cathedrals, churches and monasteries experience a distinctive aesthetic of space. Their access is controlled and they are asked to moderate behavior and dress. Christian space is hierarchically ordered from west to east with the most sacred space of the high altar inaccessible to visitors. This sense of removal and the scale and acoustics of cathedrals prompt a sense of awe, reverence and reflection. So a visit or sojourn into sacred space provides a reprieve from the chaos of the real world, the mobile phones. This has been likened to the experience of Foucault's heterotopia, a ritual space of otherness that exists out of time. It's a way of removing yourself from the contemporary world. Well, what is the value of sacred heritage in allegedly secular society like Britain? This is something that I've been reflecting on quite carefully because a few months ago this question was put to me very plainly and pointedly by a trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund when he said, we live in the most secularized society in the world, what is the rationale for funding this sacred heritage site? We're still waiting for news of whether they funded it or not. There are several issues to unpick here. First, is there an appetite for sacred heritage and if so by whom and for what reasons is it valued? What are the different types of value attached to sites and objects of sacred heritage? Well, the first thing to say is that heritage professionals may live in a secular world but many others do not and politicians and intellectuals are concerned about desecularization and the process of re-enchantment by religion. Rather than living in a post-modern secular world, we may actually be living in a post-secular religious world according to the religious scholar Talal Asad. These concerns arise directly from the increase of Christian fundamentalism in the United States and Islamic extremism in Europe but at the same time there's been a spiritual turn in Western societies, a shift away from organized religion towards an emphasis on the personal experience of spirit, mind and body and their connectedness. Re-enchantment is a term used to signal this new openness to areas previously regarded as irrational and non-scientific such as new age religion and individual spiritual experience. It counters the view originally proposed by Max Weber that modernity is characterized by the progressive disenchantment of the world. Examples of re-enchantment on an individual level include the rise of transcendent tourism and the resurgent of interest in Christian pilgrimage in Western Europe. So it seems that rather than turning away from religion, there's strong evidence of increasing engagement with religion in Western Europe through heritage, especially in the forms of exhibitions, museums and archaeological sites and landscapes. There's a marked increase in visits to religious buildings such as Notre Dame, the staging of temporary exhibitions focusing on the sacred and even the foundation of new museums entirely dedicated to religious life in the past and present. An early example was Saint Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, founded in Glasgow in 1993, which houses exhibits relating to all the world's major religions. But there's also a major new project in development, the Faith Museum at Auckland Castle, a permanent gallery dedicated to exploring the impact that faith of all denominations has had on the history and lives of people in the British Isles from pre-history to the present day. Now that project has received 10 million pounds of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, with additional funds from private individuals and charitable trusts, and it says something about the appetite for sacred heritage. Another example is in Toronto, the inspirational Aga Khan Museum, opened in 2014, combining a new religious centre with a museum dedicated to the art of Islam. The aim is to achieve better understanding of Islamic history and culture and to promote research, performance and discussion around multiculturalism. Now we seldom consider religious or spiritual value when we think about archaeological definitions of heritage values, but it is central to the definition of social value recently outlined by Sean Jones, quote, including people's sense of identity, belonging and place, as well as forms of memory and spiritual association. Jones emphasises the role of intangible heritage in constructing value, including spiritual associations, folklore, myth and even family history in shaping how communities relate to specific places. But the connection between sacred heritage and local memory is sometimes mediated by stronger local associations. For example, a study of the value of the Wearmouth and Jarrow monastic landscapes concluded that Bede's monastery was actually less significant to local identity than the industrial heritage. Local memory and sense of place were more keenly attached to industrial landscapes that brought economic prosperity to the northeast region. So interpretation of Wearmouth and Jarrow's monastic landscape should ideally be integrated with industrial heritage to meet local expectations of social value. Sacred heritage contributes to other categories of value, such as well-being. Many pilgrims attracted to pilgrimage routes today, such as the arduous Camino to Santiago de Compostela, are motivated by the physical challenge of the journey and the therapeutic contact with nature and the promise of encountering what they regard as the authentic medieval past. Local residents have benefited economically, and the Camino landscape has been restored and themed to complement the medieval pilgrimage narrative. Sacred heritage also has political value, for example, in reparation and reconciliation. Medieval Jewish heritage has served this purpose in Austria, a nation which has struggled to come to terms with its role in the Holocaust. In 1995, the decision was taken to erect a Holocaust memorial in Vienna designed by Rachel Whiteread. The site chosen was the location of the medieval synagogue in Judensplatz, destroyed after a pogrom in 1420 when the Jews of Vienna were murdered, expelled, or forcibly baptized. Research excavations revealed three phases of the synagogue, as well as new information on standards of living within the Jewish ghetto. The archaeological evidence served as a material witness for the earliest violent persecution of the Jewish community. It helped to provide a platform for Austrian reparation. More broadly, development since the Second World War of the archaeological study of medieval Judaism has contributed to a sense of identity and pride in the past for European Jews. So looking closer to home, the multiple values of heritage are discussed in the recent SCARF research framework for carved stones in Scotland. It considers issues of stewardship for carved stones of all period, many of which can be defined as medieval sacred heritage. It explores the cyclical relationship between archaeological knowledge and values, something that interests me. How we value, how what we value informs what we seek to understand, and how values inform decision making on stewardship. Different ways of valuing are identified in relation to carved stones, including academic, aesthetic, social, spiritual, economic, cultural, and temporal. The brief discussion of spiritual religious value emphasizes the importance of carved stones in contributing to a sense of place and adding time depth to a locality. The now familiar question is posed in a predominantly secular society, how are carved stones to be understood and valued in a religious context? Well, I would respond that one possible approach would be to ask faith groups how they interpret categories of value. How do they value their religious heritage in terms of historical authenticity, aesthetic and sensory qualities, local memory and meanings, economic and political capital? A spiritual perspective informs understanding of value, but it is part of a more holistic perception of heritage. The resurgence of interest in pilgrimage today amongst faith groups is clear evidence of the contemporary value of sacred heritage. New pilgrimage traditions are being actively developed by faith communities as a means of revitalizing local religion. For example, on the Kaur Peninsula in southern Argyll, a project focusing on faith tourism incorporates medieval churches and carved stones. How do these local communities value and experience medieval sacred heritage? These questions have been addressed in Avril Maddrell's recent study of emerging pilgrimage practices on the Isle of Man. She considers the annual pilgrimage, which centres on the island's medieval keels, tiny chapels that may have originated as private churches. The annual pilgrimage, Praying the Keels, began in 2006 as an ecumenical movement, a means for individuals and communities of worship to connect through prayer walks, focusing on medieval religious sites in the landscape. The participants are largely local, and while many are motivated by faith, others attend for the sense of fellowship, the physical experience of walking, and interest in the island's heritage. Maddrell concludes that the heritage of the keel is treated as a spiritual resource by the islanders. Heritage is central to the endeavour. Local historians and Manx national heritage curators provide public lectures to complement the prayer walks. Worship, walking and talking have reanimated the keels as sacred spaces and contributed to Manx national identity. There is also interest in the continuity of the keels with earlier ritual practices, and archaeological authenticity is therefore regarded as important. There is a projection of the contemporary values of Celtic spirituality onto the past, a belief that the early Celtic church was somehow closer to nature and less hierarchical and patriarchal than other church traditions. On the Isle of Man, local people have actively created a new purpose for medieval religious heritage that contributes spiritual value alongside well-being and cultural and economic value. This kind of faith heritage is a good example of what has been termed heritage from below, a local grassroots movement which mobilises people and contributes to both identity and placemaking. I began by examining how archaeology projects a secular framework of interpretation onto the archaeology of religion. The value of sacred heritage in a secular society is often questioned, but there is ample evidence of increasing engagement with the spiritual through heritage. Archaeological discussions of heritage value have tended to omit spiritual value, but this dimension is now gaining attention in definitions that place greater emphasis on intangible heritage. In concluding, I want to consider how we can apply the lessons of recent research in order to engage medieval archaeology with the sacred. There are two separate strands I want to reflect on. The first is how we engage with contemporary communities in adding value to sacred heritage and how we engage more meaningfully with medieval beliefs in our interpretations of archaeology. So two separate strands. Classic definitions of sacred heritage emphasise the otherness of sacred sites. They are places associated with the gods and separate from everyday life. That's what all the textbooks on sacred heritage and sacred sites tell you. But recent research on the local value of heritage demonstrates that religious sites and objects are fully integrated in everyday life. Sean Jones argues that the spiritual associations attach to a sense of place in former communities' collective identity and memory. Avril Maddrell's study of pilgrimage practice on the Isle of Man is a superb example of this process. The community has reanimated the heritage of the Keels to grow ecumenicalism and at the same time they have strengthened local and national identity in connection with medieval archaeology. The Manx example helps us to tease out the values of sacred heritage. Many people are drawn to the annual pilgrimage through a desire to share their faith, but secular participants also come along to seek companionship, local heritage and the sensory experience of walking in the landscape. The spiritual value of heritage is part of a more holistic experience or perception of religious sites and landscapes and one that is not exclusive to faith communities. Religious heritage can evoke a spiritual experience in secular individuals through reflections on the numinous or on loss in the case of battlefields, a connection with nature, appreciation of social memory or the sense of well-being that comes from taking time out to contemplate a religious object, building or landscape. Spiritual value is not incompatible with secular society. It is closely bound up with well-being and aesthetic value, the sensory and visual qualities of heritage as experienced by individuals. Sean Jones argues that the social value of heritage should be regarded as dynamic, a process of valuing heritage places rather than a fixed value category that can be defined and measured. So social value becomes an index of how local people engage with heritage rather than the historical significance of a site or a monument. By engaging carved stones and early medieval churches in ecumenical pilgrimage practices, places of relatively minor historical value may take on high social value. And to ascertain this value requires archaeologists to engage in more participatory research such as ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and focus groups. And this is becoming more important. Debates about authority and multi-vocality are prompting a paradigm shift towards participatory methods that emphasize co-production of knowledge and community engagement, as well as prioritizing the ethical responsibilities of working with living communities. But our interrogation of sacred heritage should also give critical consideration to its ideological use, to conflict and contestation. The archaeology of medieval churches and monasteries can appear deceptively neutral, apolitical and atheoretical. But when projected as heritage, archaeology is never neutral, particularly where the subject matter is explicitly ideological. We recognize that prehistoric sacred heritage sites are contested by contemporary communities like Stonehenge and Catalhoyuk. The example of Cordoba's Mesquita to some demonstrates that medieval sacred heritage sites can also be highly contested, revealing tensions and confrontations between faiths in the past and the present. Medieval sacred heritage in Britain is also conflictual, for instance, where heritage professionals and local communities disagree on interpretation or conservation strategies. Medieval Christian sites are sometimes locales of contested heritage. Glastonbury Abbey, for example, a site where I've worked for many years, is subject to competing heritage narratives and access to the site for ritual use is controlled by the dominant Anglican faith. The second question I posed in this concluding section is how we might engage more meaningfully with the sacred in our interpretations of medieval archaeology. The connection is in the reflexive relationship between archaeological knowledge and values, how what we value informs what we seek to understand. I have argued that medieval archaeology follows the Western intellectual tradition in projecting a secular framework of values onto the study of religion, resulting in the prioritization of rational categories such as economy and technology over irrational categories such as magic and folk belief. We've also seen that archaeological evidence is frequently used to underpin narratives of continuity in relation to sacred space, with inadequate considerations given to change, conflict and human agency in shaping religious belief. Some archaeologists have advocated a more practice-based approach to the study of religion in order to emphasize agency and embodiment. These approaches examine ritual as a material process and give priority to the active role of people in using sacred space and material culture, in contrast with secularist approaches that see religious participants as passive and controlled by elites. The study of medieval pilgrimage is a pertinent example. Archaeological approaches have emphasized the economic dimensions of medieval pilgrimage, ranging from the production and sale of pilgrim souvenirs to the commercial and physical infrastructure developed at urban and rural shrines. In contrast, anthropological, historical and geographical perspectives on pilgrimage increasingly emphasize embodied experience. For example, the historian James Bungslag has highlighted the intimate physical engagement between the medieval pilgrim and the shrine, which might involve kissing the tomb or the relics, pilgrims thrusting their hands into these foramina shrines to recover dust, ingesting dust, blood or water that was believed to come into contact with the saint, bathing in water associated with the shrine, and even sleeping at the saint's tomb in the hope of receiving religious visions. At Chartres, for example, pilgrims kept vigils in the cathedral, in the nave of the cathedral, which was designed with a floor and a water system to sluice out the church each morning after the pilgrims had left. Infirm pilgrims seeking a cure slept for nine nights in the cathedral crypt, which was staffed by female nurses in the 15th century. Pilgrims made offerings of candles and placed votives, often models of the afflicted body part for which they sought a cure. They also purchased cheap souvenirs or blessings which served as contact relics to protect them on the homeward journey. Archaeologists have focused on these pilgrim souvenirs as the most direct material evidence for medieval pilgrimage, but they've seldom considered the embodied experience of the pilgrimage journey or the ritual experience at the shrine. It's a difficult thing for archaeologists to approach, but this is where archaeology might engage fruitfully with folklore, particularly in considering the rich evidence of folk belief in Scotland. Both archaeology and folklore reveal evidence for the persistence of material practices and embodied rites associated with pilgrimage, such as the construction of cairns and the placing of white pebbles. Cairns of pebbles on the beach at Columbus Bay on Iona were likely created by medieval pilgrims, a tradition that continues today. Folklore sources suggest that these traditions continued in the 18th and 19th century as healing rituals associated with holy wells, where pilgrims gathered stones and placed them on cairns as part of the healing rite. These embodied practices appear to represent long-term continuities, but they took on new meanings in a post-medieval context. Healing wells and pools, such as St. Fillens' Well in the Highlands and Locke Marie in the Northwest, became associated with folk cures for insanity. At St. Fillens' Well, the ritual involved circling the cairn three times and then placing an offering on the cairn, either a stone or a rag. The unfortunate person was then bound and left overnight in the ruins of the chapel, with St. Fillens' bell placed on their head, strapped on their head. The historian Emily Donohoe argues that the religious aspect of the rite was lost as it became more medicalised, connected with the growing interest in cures for insanity that included cold water bathing and walking. On the Isle of Marie, pilgrims drank from the well and made offerings to an adjacent oak tree, or placed votives in chinks in the rock, such as coins, pins and buttons. Rags and ribbons were tied to the tree in the 19th century in the tradition of a clouty tree, but it became more common to nail metal objects into the tree on Marie, including coins, buckles and nails. The historian Kerry Holbrook argues that this was part of a protective ritual, drawing on the Highland belief that metal repelled malevolent supernatural creatures, such as fairies. The practice persists today, but the meaning of the ritual had changed by the late 19th century. The tree was central in healing rites involving the well, but gradually became a wishing tree, a more secular ritual, but one still involving embodied practices of pilgrimage. In both these examples, folklore sources are used critically to assess the changing meanings of rituals that appear to represent long-term continuity, but actually embody changing beliefs. Pilgrims today are drawn to the idea of ritual continuity at sites of medieval sacred heritage. At the Isle of Whithorn, a new cairn was begun in 1997 as an ecumenical act to mark 1600 years since St Ninian established the church in Scotland. The cairn began as a local act of celebration, with schoolchildren placing stones that bore their names, followed by pilgrims placing stones, and it eventually grew to a substantial mound, with pilgrims of any faith or none placing a symbolic stone as an act of witness. The cairns are regarded by local people as an ancient communal rite, a means of marking a burial or route. Many of the stones placed at Whithorn's witness cairn are placed in memory of the recent dead, both people and animals. Placing a stone represents a personal spiritual act, one that engages with material practices and locales of medieval sacred heritage. Contemporary communities create their own value around medieval sacred heritage, which often involves the invention of tradition, and which engages both faith communities and secular imagination. The following lectures develop the themes introduced here. I begin tomorrow by reflecting on the relationship between archaeological knowledge and values, particularly the role of Scottish national identity in shaping approaches to the study of medieval monasticism. The next lecture takes a new perspective on monastic archaeology, setting aside secular frameworks, first to examine monastic healing and connections between spirit, mind and body, and then the relationship between magic and religion. On Sunday, the fifth lecture focuses on the changing meanings of sacred landscapes after the Reformation, reflecting on place and memory, and how sacred landscapes were actively reimagined by successive generations. And the final lecture, those of you who've got the stamina, returns to the theme of heritage, examining political and spiritual discourses and the role of archaeology in authenticating and challenging myths connected with medieval sacred sites. Thank you.