Regional Religious Networks in the Roman Empire

RENE is a first interdisciplinary study to investigate interactions between rural and urban cult sites, their communities, the diffusion of religious traditions and architectural style, the regional mobility of elite (temple benefactors and dedicators), and how the latter affected religious traits. It is based on published archaeological, epigraphic and sculptural materials in two extreme parts of the Roman Empire. They are: the Hauran (Southern Syria), and Lusitania (roughly Portugal and the western part of Spain) from the pre-Roman to the Roman period periods (the second century BC to the third century AD). It will examine their variation and reasoning by contextualising the study areas within their geography and their socio-political background, which will contribute to scholarly debates on the Roman world from the West to the East. It will reevaluate rural and urban cult sites as multifaceted indicators of continuous evolving religious processes and of fluctuating contexts shaped by interactions of different social and political actors through the emergent computer-based method of social network analysis (SNA) that I will learn thanks to the training programme offered by Marie Skodowska-Curie fellowship. The database of cult sites, their SNA models and results of RENE will be freely available on the project’s website which I will create thanks to the training programme of the fellowship.