Los contextos de fundación de las iglesias tardoantiguas en Galicia (ss. V-VIII): substratos arqueológicos, distribución y significados

This paper aims to analyze and discuss the different spatial contexts in which churches were founded in Galicia (Northwest Spain) between the 5^thand the 8^thcentury. This is a topic with great potential, but scarcely studied so far by Spanish historians, since texts offer very little evidences about the specific contexts of foundation, and material data have almost only been approached from perspectives of traditional archaeology or history of art. The present work aims to explore these spatial contexts of Galician churches foundation from a catalogue of 50 possible Late Antique ecclesiastical buildings, based both on archaological works and stilistic-typological approaches. Although some of the data are still problematic, interesting ideas relating distribution and archaeological substrates can be observed in the general corpus. Following these premises, in the first part it is discussed the wider geographical frame of church foundation, mainly the distribution of evidences in relation to different Galician environments and Late Antique territorial articulation. So, it is observed an important relationship between evidences of churches and Roman-Late Roman dynamic axis and areas in Galicia. The second part analyzes the relation of the evidences with their archaeological substrates and discusses different evolutions from Roman to Medieval uses, which are not always lineal. This means dealing with the concepts of continuity-break and pragmatical-symbolical reuse, and it will be discussed here whether material techniques are reliable indicators of socioeconomical development. In the third part some proposals regarding different historical and geographical contexts for church foundation in Late Antique and Early Medieval Galicia are presented. Complexity and variety in cases are likely to be bigger than usually thought and approaches such as the study of building techniques can be, in the future, a powerful indicator to solve some problems. In general, in spite of many limits, Late Antique foundation of churches in Galicia, show similar characteristics to other Western European regions.