Investing in Sculpture: Power in Early-historic Scotland

Between prehistory and history: the archaeological detection of social change among the Picts

“…of power (e.g. Gondek 2006;Carver 2008). At the greatest Pictish fort of all, at Burghead, fragments of early Christian sculpture and evidence of an early church suggest that pagan Pictish leadership was quickly transformed into Christian kingship, where there was more of a divide between the royal and the sacred (cf.…”

“…There is, therefore, a likelihood that a shared early belief system and/or symbolic system was transferred to a Christian one. The later stones also show greater investment of resources, suggesting the desire for a more formal and economically demanding form of monumentality at more concentrated localities through time (Gondek 2006). However, at present it is difficult to carry interpretation any further, the major problems being that archaeological dating and investigation of these monuments remains rare and that few of them stand in their original context.…”

Northumbria in the West: Considering Interaction Through Monumentality

“…Although useful, this 'checklist' approach has not tended to illustrate differences within Christian investment or address the insights that can be gained by studying these variations (Lane 2001: 149;Petts 2003a: 109). Maps have been used as a valuable means of exploring Christian investment and used to reveal aspects of the political landscape (Driscoll 2000;Carver 2001;Gondek 2006). In this study, variations within Christian investment -sculpture, ecclesiastical sites, and place-names -have been mapped in order to reveal aspects of the political landscape in western Britain both before and following the Northumbrian expansion.…”

Introduction: Stones in Substance, Space and Time

“…Hawkes 2002), but also from the interplay of media, contexts and distribution (e.g. Andreeff 2012;Stocker 2000;Gondek 2006a;Griffiths 2006;Rodwell et al 2008;Sidebottom 1994) facilitated by formal corpora such as those ongoing for England (e.g. Cramp 2006) and recently completed for Wales (e.g.…”