A new study published in Open Archaeology by Sebastian Kheml, Tomáš Glomb, and Aleš Chalupa examines how malaria shaped religious life in the Roman Empire. Combining traditional historiography with Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis, the authors investigated whether the distribution of ancient healing cults dedicated to Asclepius and Apollo correlates spatially with malaria-prone zones in Roman Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia. Using a digitized version of the 19th-century Torelli map of pre-eradication malaria alongside epigraphic data from the Latin Inscriptions in Space and Time (LIST) dataset, the team compared inscriptions for the healing deities with those of seven other Roman gods, including Jupiter, Minerva, Mercury, and Hercules.
The results provide significant support for the hypothesis that malaria risk was a contributing factor in the spread of healing cults. Provinces and regions with larger malaria-prone areas, such as Latium et Campania, Etruria, and Sardinia, show statistically significant higher proportions of inscriptions dedicated to Asclepius and Apollo. A spatial proximity analysis further revealed that half of all locations with Asclepius inscriptions lay within roughly 2.4 km of the nearest malaria-prone zone, considerably closer than any other deity examined. The authors interpret these patterns as evidence that endemic malaria likely influenced the religious preferences of Roman communities, illustrating how environmental pressures shaped lived religion in antiquity.
Our new article published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities uses the trial record of Bernard-Oth of Niort and his family to demonstrate the benefits of Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO), a custom approach that not only captures informational content but also its discursive and contextual embedding.
Kaarel Sikk, David Zbíral, and Reima Välimäki have published a new study in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities that examines how Peter Zwicker's inquisition in Stettin (1393–94) utilised information gathered from deponent testimonies over the course of subsequent interrogations. The analysis of network and temporal data offers a fresh perspective on strategic decision-making by inquisitors.
