RENE · Regional Religious Networks in the Roman Empire
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-08-15 → 2022-10-28
- EU contribution
- €202,159
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Regional Religious Networks in the Roman Empire
RENE has revealed the important role of landscape (road networks and cities), and mobility of actors from different backgrounds (temple benefactors, like soldiers) in shaping major religious centres and religious and cultural transmissions (identified through gods of cult sites and their architecture). This has been possible through social network and spatial analyses of gods, temple benefactors, and cult sites’ architecture. RENE has demonstrated the validity of this new quantitative interdisciplinary approach by looking at two study areas in the Roman Empire (Hauran, southern Syria, and Lusitania, roughly Portugal). It has pushed forward the study of Roman religion, moving beyond scholarly debate focusing on the discourse between local and Roman cultures by considering religious identities as dynamic entities resulting from complex and multiple interactions between different social and political agents and deeply interconnected with the landscape. RENE has made datasets and results open access while disseminating them in conferences, through Twitter and an English/Norwegian educational video. Through a multidisciplinary quantitative analysis of cult sites and religion in the Roman period, RENE has unravelled the complexity of our cultures, arguing their diversity as a result of people's movement and the landscape they are embedded in. Through this study and providing a broad range of dissemination and accessibility of its results, RENE has promoted European Union Work Plan for Culture 2018-2022, stating that “Cultural heritage is the manifestation of cultural diversity”.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
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 Skłodowska-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.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITETET I BERGEN · BergenCoordinatorNorway
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union