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Data about the earliest history of medieval churches of southern Estonia are fragmentary, being limited to the first mentions of the parish, priest or congregation, or to mostly scanty historical information about the architecture. Some information can also be provided by archaeological grave finds, which often date back further than the first data about the churches. The article presents a brief survey of the finds from the churchyards of southern Estonia, the area of medieval diocese of Tartu, from before ca. 1450 AD. The finds, mostly jewellery and fragments of cremated bones, show that churches were often built on top of old cemeteries from the Final Iron Age, whereby the pre-Christian jewellery items, mostly brooches, rings and bracelets, date mainly from the 11th to the early 13th centuries. If the cases in which the archaeological information is limited or non-existent are excluded, 60% of the rural churches of southern Estonia (9 out of 15) were built on pre-Christian cemeteries. The percentage may even be higher, since archaeological data for more than half of the churchyards is either missing or insufficient for drawing any conclusions. In the cases where major temporal gaps exist between the Final Iron Age finds and the first written or architectural data about the church, the cemetery probably functioned continuously as a village cemetery in the Christian period. The pre-Christian origins of the cemeteries in the churchyards indicate that the local communities were actively involved in choosing the locations for the churches at the time of Christianization. Place continuity also shows that, despite the violent nature of Christianization, the natives of southern Estonia did not oppose having Christian sanctuaries built on pre-Christian cemeteries, and evidently, the continuous use of the former burial site was considered important.