Sankt Mary´s Priory and Parish church, Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. A buildingsarchaeological survey

Abstract: The dissertation is the result of an exchange year spent at the Department of archaeology at Glasgow University, Glasgow, Scotland. The direction was buildings archaeology and the course was called an M.phil. by research, a postgraduate degree. At the time, in 1996-97, it was somewhat equal to a Swedish magister degree. The object was St Mary´s priory and parish church of Monymusk, situated in Aberdeenshire on the east coast of Scotland. The church is of high antiquarian and historical significance and is still in use as a parochial church. The main aim of the dissertation was to develop a fast and accurate method for buildings archaeological surveys mainly for the world of rescue archaeology, involving rectified photography, totalstations and computer software like AutoCAD, correlated with a stratigraphical, single-context method. The survey was also to provide the first accurate survey of an important parochial and monastic church in Scotland, and to answer outstanding questions relating to the architectural and social history of the church. The results showed that the church had been founded in the 10th century, probably by a local lair; that Christian missionaries, in the form of an order called the Culdees, settled in the church around the end of the 11th century; the church was a shared building from about 1078 until the reformation in 1560; the church kept transforming with the new direction of faith until today. The combination of methods proved successful and was applied to a series of objects in Scotland during the late 1990s. It was also useful in a public situation, creating analytical drawings and the possibility of three-dimensional reconstruction.