Page 67 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 12(2) (2024)

Figure 1: The church Santa Maria d’Àneu in the landscape of Àneu valley, viewed from the road from Esterri d’Àneu
village.
67
that emerged from this study: the limitations
explore whether the church bells of Santa Maria of virtual simulations, the challenges of assess-
d’Àneu, as a symbol of authority, could be heard ing bell audibility over long distances, and how
across the parishes that comprised the district, our findings on visibility and audibility contrib-
potentially indicating its central role. In addi- ute to understanding Santa Maria d’Àneu’s role
tion, this soundscape study is complemented by within the medieval Àneu deanery.
a visibility analysis of the site. Our research thus
offers new insights that may help to clarify San- The Ecclesiastical Significance
ta Maria’s significance as a potential ecclesiasti- of Santa Maria d’Àneu
cal center in the Àneu valley. The Santa Maria d’Àneu church is an exception-
To achieve this, the paper is structured as al case in the ecclesiastical history of the Catalan
follows: First, we explore the current under- Pyrenees. Despite the limited documentation Unveiling the Historical Significance of Santa Maria D’àneu
standing of the ecclesiastical significance of San- that has survived, the importance of this reli-
ta Maria d’Àneu. In the second section, we de- gious center can be argued based on its central
tail our three-part methodology, which includes position in the Àneu valley, its imposing archi-
onsite acoustic measurements, virtual sound tecture, and the exceptional Romanesque paint-
propagation simulations, and visibility analy- ings that decorate its apse (fig. 1). Nevertheless,
ses. For the acoustic measurements, we simulta- this church never attained parish status nor gen-
neously used a sound level meter to record the erated a surrounding population, and its correct
bell sounds and background noise and an au- interpretation remains a challenge for historians
dio recorder to capture these sound events. Vir- today.
tual simulations of bell sound propagation were Very little information is available on the
conducted using ESRI ArcGIS Desktop 10.5 earliest origins of Santa Maria d’Àneu. One of
and the freely available Sound Mapping Tools the first Carolingian privileges from the 9th
(SMT) toolbox, specifically the SPreAD-GIS century that refers to the Àneu valley, confirm-
script (Reed, Boggs, and Mann 2012). For the ing its attachment to the bishopric of Urgell, al-
visibility analysis, we used the QGIS Visibility ready mentions a place under the patronage of
Analysis plugin (Čučković 2016) to establish the Santa Deodata that could be identified as the
viewshed of Santa Maria d’Àneu, the cumulative later church of Santa Maria (Abadal i de Vinyals
viewshed of the entire deanery, and the intervis- 1950, 286–288). In a forgery dated 819, whose
1
ibility network between its parish churches. In
the third section, we present the results of these 1 The same reference also appears in three confirmatory pa-
pal bulls of the years 951, 1001, and 1012 (Ordeig Mata
simulations. Finally, we discuss three key themes 2020, 402–4; Baraut Obiols 1980, 100–101; 1981, 38–40).