Publication details
Mining and Medical Infrastructure as Potential Predictors for the Spatial Distribution of the Cult of Asclepius in Dacia
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | The Danubian provinces of the Roman Empire have proven to be a fertile ground for current research employing spatial modeling approaches, owing to the abundance of epigraphic and archaeological evidence for different aspects of Roman society. An example of this trend is a recent study, The Spread of the Cult of Asclepius in the Context of the Roman Army: A Spatial Proximity Analysis (Glomb 2021), which demonstrated that epigraphic evidence mentioning Roman physicians spatially positively correlates with material evidence for the healing cult of Asclepius in the Danubian region. However, the province of Dacia stood out as an outlier in this analysis, showing a high number of Latin inscriptions mentioning Asclepius but very little epigraphic evidence for the presence of physicians. Therefore, in this paper, we revisit the “Dacia” research problem, testing whether the spatial distribution of Latin inscriptions dedicated to Asclepius was potentially impacted by factors such as attested mining and medical infrastructure. The rationale behind the selection of these factors is that 1) mining posed significant health risks for miners, which could have led to increased worship of healing deities, and 2) medical infrastructure was directly associated with healing, potentially inviting the worship of Asclepius. With regard to data, mining activity in the region is digitally documented in the OXREP database, while proxies for medical activity in Dacia include attested epigraphic evidence of specialists (e.g., eye doctors), archaeological finds of medical tools, and geocoded spa facilities. The epigraphic data are drawn from the Latin Inscriptions in Space and Time (LIST) dataset, which has a detailed set of attributes that allow for conducting a spatial proximity analysis in a Geographic Information System (GIS). |
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