Some words go here about the welcome and opening comments

Although today dominated by the impressive ruins of the later medieval abbey, St. Augustine’s Abbey – part of the Canterbury UNESCO Word Heritage site – was the base for the late sixth-century Papal mission to Kent, sent by Gregory the Great, which led ultimately to the establishment the English Church. The Mission was pivotal in the later development of English religious and political life, culture and even architecture, but most of what is published about the earliest phases of St. Augustine’s derives from early 20th-century excavations, and little attention has been paid to what was at the site prior to the arrival of the missionaries in 597. Established in 2019, the ‘Mission to England’ project seeks to employ 21st-century archaeological methods to enhance understanding of the origins and earliest development of the St. Augustine’s site. The first part of the project’s work, at the Chapel of St. Pancras, has already identified what may well be the earliest known ‘Anglo-Saxon’ church built in Britain – and the only one which may have been commissioned, consecrated and used by the leader of the Papal mission, St. Augustine of Canterbury. 

Evolving burial practices in the Seventh Century

This presentation will focus on new methods of assessing how burial practices evolved across the seventh century, demonstrating that the spread of unfurnished burial had little to do with the conversion to Christianity. I will then counter this by considering a few burials with explicit Christian imagery, and what they can tell us about conversion processes.

Feasting with Latinus: the earliest Christians of Whithorn

The excavations led by the late Peter Hill at Whithorn, Dumfries and Galloway are widely understood as revealing one of the earliest monasteries in Britain. New analysis and dating evidence by the Cold Case Whithorn project is forcing a rethink of the earliest phases of the sequence. A poorly-understood late Roman phase was followed by an early medieval settlement marked with a fifth-century AD Latin-inscribed stone bearing a Christian invocation. The fifth to seventh-century sequence is characterised by feasting activity, including copious amounts of luxury imported ceramic and glass vessels from Gaul and the eastern Mediterranean, alongside metalworking and ephemeral timber structures. The archaeological signal is reminiscent of early royal and proto-royal settlements in northern and western Britain, rather than a monastery. The precocious adoption of the Christian faith and the Latin language at Whithorn can instead be explained a the seat of a Late Antique regulus or perhaps a wealthy bishop – it is not clear that the two would be distinguishable archaeologically. This raises new questions about the conversion to Christianity beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire, and the dominance of the monastic model for our understanding of the events of the mid-first millennium AD in northern and western Britain.

The archaeology of the early medieval monastery of Lindisfarne

In this presentation, we will explore the archaeology of the early medieval monastery of Lindisfarne – a site which became one of the most powerful monastic centres in early medieval Britain, and is particularly associated with the creation of the Lindisfarne Gospels. We will see how archaeology is able to present a complex and nuanced understanding of the site, building on (and sometimes contradicting) the traditional textual accounts

There will be an opportunity after the four presentations to ask questions of our speakers, and respond in general to the themes of the conference.