Informace o publikaci
Worshipping Silvanus at Work: Approaching Roman Professional Ecologies as Sacred Landscapes Quantitatively
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | This paper proposes a hypothesis that the worship of specific deities played a significant role in mitigating uncertainties and reducing risks associated with working environments in the Roman Empire. For example, hunters were tied to animal habitats, miners to mineral deposits, and soldiers to tensions at political borders, and any abrupt change or disbalance in those environments constituted an enormous threat to the livelihood of those professionals. Through appropriate worship, people of profession had the means of transforming their working environment into a balanced sacred landscape protected by a deity. This paper tests these assumptions through a case study focusing on exploring quantitatively the relationships between working environments and the worship of Silvanus, the Roman god of woods, uncultivated lands, fields, and estates. Methodologically, the paper presents formal analyses of geocoded Latin epigraphic evidence as a proxy for both professional activities and situated worship of Silvanus in the Roman Empire. By using spatial proximity analysis and machine-learning predictive models, the paper explores whether it is possible to retrospectively predict a portion of the known places of worship of Silvanus by geocoded locations of professional ecologies dependent on forest conditions. As a result, the paper opens the broader question of to what extent people of profession contributed to the known spatiotemporal distribution of cults in the Roman Empire by transforming their places of work into sacred landscapes. |
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