Sanctuaries in Roman Dacia: Materiality and Religious Experience. By Csaba Szabó.

Abstract

In spite of important exceptions bridging the two fields, the archaeology of the Roman provinces and the study of Roman polytheistic religion often appear even today as separate disciplines. Archaeologists dedicate most of their efforts to the publication and interpretation of the material brought to light by their excavations. On the other hand, the most innovative scholars of religious history pay more attention to theoretical approaches taken from sociology, anthropology, and religious studies than to collecting and evaluating large bodies of archaeological and epigraphic evidence. More intense dialogue between these two fields has great potential for advancing our understanding of the religious history of the ancient world. The book under review, Csaba Szabó’s doctoral dissertation defended in Erfurt and Pécs, is an attempt to achieve just this.1 Szabó aims to analyse the rich epigraphic and archaeological evidence about sanctuaries in Roman Dacia using the questions and methods developed by the Lived Ancient Religion Project (LAR), one of the most innovative research programmes in this field, headed by Jörg Rüpke at Erfurt. As will become clear from the following, Szabó often succeeds in making the epigraphic and archaeological material “speak” about religious experiences in Dacia, even if his reconstructions are not always fully convincing. Szabó’s approach is made even more important by the fact that much—often very high quality—research on Roman Dacia was published in Romanian, and therefore remains inaccessible to most foreign scholars. The Introduction (pp. 1–10) presents the main categories and methodological assumptions according to which the material regarding religion in Roman Dacia is analysed. For Szabó’s work, the most important element and major methodological innovation of the LAR project is the category of “space sacralization”, which is used