The development of the church and settlement of Rottenburg-Sülchen, district of Tübingen. A model case for the formation of central places during the founding period of the Diocese of Constance

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Steffen Patzold; Dr. Jonathan Scheschkewitz; Privatdozent Dr. Lukas Werther
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology ; Medieval History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 562933444

The formation of churches and the integration of early church foundations of the Merovingian and Carolingian periods into settlement structure and society is controversially discussed for southwestern Germany. Since meaningful findings have been lacking so far, German-speaking archaeological research largely adhered to the traditional model of „Eigenkirchen“ and thus also to the idea of a Christianization tied to local noble landlords. The excavations in Rottenburg-Sülchen (district of Tübingen) give for the first time the opportunity to clarify key questions about the formation of church sites, the associated settlements and the actors in a dialogue with the historical sciences: (1) When do the first churches in Alamannia arise and which power structures are reflected in them? (2) Are churches the result or the starting point of centralisation on a local scale? (3) What did the local population see in such a building, how and by whom was it used? (4) What makes a building a church and what degree of Christianization and ecclesiastical organization can be deduced from the findings? The starting point of the project is the outstanding archaeological setting in Sülchen consisting of a row-grave cemetery (6th/7th century), a church with an overlying graveyard (7th to 9th/10th century) and a coherent settlement area (from the 5th century onwards) which is archaeologically documented on a large scale. Within the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, the architecture and the spatial structure of the church site as well as the factors that led to the formation of the setting of church and burial ground are to be reconstructed. Furthermore, we aim to analyse the spatial, chronological and functional development of the corresponding settlement and to identify central place components. For church, burial ground and settlement the question of presence, localization, and characterization of local elites is of particular importance. A precise analysis of the chronological relationships of burial ground, church, and settlement will allow to approach the local society, to place the entire complex in its regional and supra-regional frame of reference, and to enlighten the social, economic, and religious conditions and mechanisms of church formation. Finally, the local results in Sülchen will be merged and compared with concepts and results of other landscapes in the Frankish Empire with a more sophisticated state of research to develop transferable models of the formation of Merovingian and Carolingian central places in southwestern Germany. At the same time, Sülchen serves as a pilot project for the further development of innovative open source tools for modeling, networking, analysis and enhancement of the complex data of all participating disciplines on the basis of the FAIR principles.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Gabriele Graenert