Publication details
Medical infrastructure, mines, and veterans: A quantitative analysis of predictors of the worship of Asclepius in Roman 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, revealing a high concentration 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 inscriptions dedicated to Asclepius was potentially impacted by factors such as the presence of veterans, attested mining and medical infrastructure, or their combination. The rationale behind the selection of these factors is that 1) veterans in Dacia were potentially in need of medical and spa treatments due to their long service in the Roman army, 2) mining posed significant health risks for miners, and 3) medical infrastructure was directly associated with healing, which all could have led to increased worship of healing deities. With regard to data, the presence of veterans and the cult of Asclepius is approximated from inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg; mining activity in the region is digitally documented in the OXREP database, proxies for medical activity in Dacia include archaeological evidence of specialists (e.g., eye doctors), finds of medical tools, and geocoded spa facilities. These data have a detailed set of attributes, allowing for the conduct of a spatial proximity analysis in a GIS. |
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