The present paper addresses a recurring DH-problem: how to engage with archival and legacy (archaeological) documentation that is dispersed, unevenly recorded and described in incompatible and multilingual vocabularies. Using mortuary data as an example from the ERC-funded project RELIC, which focuses on rural Christianisation and state formation. While the example itself is specific, the theoretical and digital framework presented is applicable beyond funerary archaeology, offering a DH approach to small, heterogeneous datasets in which the goal is not only digitisation, but making category use, comparability, and evidential context inspectable at scale.
RELIC aims to advance historical and archaeological understanding of the involvement of the general population in Christianisation and state formation, while also reflecting on disciplinary epistemic conditions in the digital age. In this contribution, we present how the data infrastructure developed for the project enables contextual comparison of controversial small datasets. Extra-normative burials are an excellent example of that, because “deviancy” is not a stable empirical class but an interpretive label whose meaning depends on comparison with its normative environment. We argue that DH infrastructures can enable such comparisons by harmonising descriptors, keeping provenance visible, and supporting cross-site exploration through interface-driven analysis.
The project draws on a combination of published and archival archaeological data, historical documents, and spatial datasets. Our focus is on sites that include early rural churches, field cemeteries, transitional burial grounds, and ecclesiastical and secular power centres and their settlements, i.e. the social and political context of religious change between the 10th and 12th centuries. Many of these datasets are dispersed across national and disciplinary boundaries in East-Central Europe and are difficult to compare directly due to uneven recording practices and often incompatible, multilingual descriptive vocabularies.
For the project, we employ an interdisciplinary, multi-scalar digital approach. The OpenAtlas system serves as both a semantic backend and a spatial database, enabling multi-domain data integration and networked querying. It was the underlying framework for the THANADOS project (Eichert, 2021; Eichert, 2024) and the data collection has been significantly extended for RELIC. Precisely in this stage of large-scale diachronic survey, differences in granularity, documentation regimes and category uses become most apparent, highlighting what often appears on the surface as gaps and anomalies in the data. This requires the implementation of a clear protocol for the harmonization and normalization of highly individualized records while also opening a possibility for their interpretative contextualization.
The existing dataset shows considerable regional variation in how Christianisation took shape materially. For instance, transitional cemeteries—sites where older burial customs merged with emerging Christian norms—often show spatial reconfigurations: changes in grave alignment, architectural interventions, or selective reuse. These sites provide fertile ground for interpreting religious change as embedded in social practice and funerary negotiation.