Digital Approaches to Sacred Space in Roman Britain
Tuesday 19th May 2026, 10:00-17:30
Institute of Classical Studies, University of London
Registration (in person or online)
Description
Temples and shrines in Roman Britain have been examined since the early modern period, primarily for their architecture and monumental form. Early studies focused on plans, typologies, and building techniques, establishing categories that continue to guide our interpretation. In recent decades, scholarship has expanded to situate these sites within their local and regional landscapes, exploring their connections to roads, settlements, villas. Attention has also shifted toward the material culture associated with these sacred spaces—votive deposits, inscriptions and ritual objects—emphasizing the practices and communities that produced them. More recently, digital approaches have begun to transform the study of Roman sacred space, offering new ways to visualize, connect and analyze archaeological evidence.
This one-day workshop will explore how digital tools and methods help change the way we study and analyse temples and shrines in Roman Britain. By integrating GIS-based spatial analysis, 3D modeling and Linked Open Data infrastructures, the event examines how researchers are using new digital techniques to cast a new analytical lens on sacred sites, but also their material culture and landscape. By doing so, it demonstrates how emerging technologies create new opportunities to test existing interpretations, question established models, and formulate new hypotheses about sacred space in Roman Britain.
Organised by Maxime Guénette (University of Montréal), John Pearce (King’s College London), Gabriel Bodard (University of London).
Programme
10:00-10:30 Coffee and registration
10:30-10:45 Welcome remarks
10:45-11:15 Fragmented Data and New Networks in the Study of Roman Religion
11:15-11:45 Mapping Sacred Spaces in Roman Britain: A New Corpus on Wikidata
11:45-12:15 RomAniDat and the Pandora platform: using spatial modelling software for analysing animal bone data from temple sites
12:15-12:30 Discussion
12:30-14:00 Lunch
14:00:14:30 Digital approaches to space and excavation at the Roman shrine landscape of Teffont, Wiltshire, UK
14:30-15:00 Spectres of the Past: Haunting, Uncertainty, and Space for Digital Imaginaries
15:00-15:30 Integrating landscape-scale prospection, high-definition 3D GPR and targeted excavation at a newly discovered Romano-Celtic temple in Somerset
15:30-16:00 Coffee
16:00-16:30 Identifying sacred sites in the rural landscape
16:30-17:00 Londinium AD 215: imagining urban sacred space in Virtual Reality
17:00-17:30 Closing remarks and discussion
Abstracts
Fragmented Data and New Networks in the Study of Roman Religion
Speakers: Alessandra Esposito (King’s College London), Francesca Mazzilli (Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro)
This contribution examines the growing ‘digital turn’ in the study of ancient religions, with a focus on the Roman world, highlighting both methodological advances and persistent challenges. It critically addresses the fragmented landscape of current digital approaches, where existing projects (often institutional, geographically bounded, and unevenly cited) remain dispersed, reflecting disciplinary and regional isolation.
Alongside case studies from the Near East and Dacia, the inclusion of examples from Roman Britain highlights the richness of regional research traditions. These cases demonstrate how digital tools (GIS, network analysis, relational databases) illuminate patterns of mobility, cult transmission, and material culture, including processes of use and reuse.
Despite these resources, the field lacks unified standards, interoperable repositories, and comprehensive infrastructures beyond isolated initiatives, with some exceptions. The article calls for FAIR data, improved searchability, and clearer definitions of ‘digital religion’ for both specialists and newcomers. It advocates for cross-sectoral collaboration on frameworks and new research networks (ideally via a COST Actions) to overcome fragmentation, enhance public engagement, and address urgent heritage challenges.
Mapping Sacred Spaces in Roman Britain: A New Corpus on Wikidata
Speaker: Maxime Guénette (Université de Montréal)
This presentation introduces a new, comprehensive corpus of nearly 500 temples and sanctuaries identified across Roman Britain, offering the most up-to-date systematic inventory of sacred spaces from this period. Drawing on recent archaeological scholarship, the corpus integrates sites ranging from major Romano-Celtic temples to rural shrines and military cult sites, reflecting the rich religious diversity of the province.
A key methodological contribution of this work lies in its use of Wikidata as a platform for producing Linked Open Data (LOD). By structuring archaeological data within Wikidata’s open, collaborative framework, the corpus becomes fully interoperable with other digital humanities and heritage datasets, enabling cross-referencing with epigraphic, numismatic, and spatial databases. This approach lowers the technical barriers typically associated with LOD publication, making the data accessible to both researchers and the wider public. Finally, we also reflect on the limitations and criticisms associated with Wikidata as a publication platform for historical and archaeological datasets, situating them within broader debates on data quality, editorial control, and long-term sustainability.
RomAniDat and the Pandora platform: using spatial modelling software for analysing animal bone data from temple sites
Speakers: Tony King (University of Winchester), Dominika Schmidtova (Masaryk University), Ricardo Fernandes (Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology)
This presentation describes the RomAniDat project for analysing datasets of animal bones across the Roman world, and the project’s use of Pandora software as developed by the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology. The software enables user-entered data to be analysed for spatial modelling and mapping, as demonstrated by results for Roman Italy, Britain, the Netherlands and the Empire as a whole. Application of this software platform for animal bone (and other) data from religious sites in Britain is modelled and discussed.
Digital approaches to space and excavation at the Roman shrine landscape of Teffont, Wiltshire, UK
Speaker: David Robert (Cardiff University)
Excavations at Teffont have revealed a complex multi-period landscape centred on a ridgetop sacred space of predominantly Roman date. GIS has been critical to the project, allowing the integration of multiple forms of data, and new insights to emerge from the site. The paper will explore how kernel density mapping of multiple strands of non-invasive data, alongside integration of aerial, geophysical and excavation data, has enabled us to better understand the site, which is within woodland, and therefore has significant challenges to understanding the below ground archaeology. The paper will further reflect on the accuracy and value of the methodologies chosen to explore the site.
Spectres of the Past: Haunting, Uncertainty, and Space for Digital Imaginaries
Speaker: Anna Collar (University of Southampton)
Everywhere, we live alongside the material remains of monuments, but although the terms ‘reuse’ and ‘afterlife’ are commonly-used to describe what happens with or to monuments beyond the time of their primary use, these terms carry serious conceptual issues: implying both passivity in monuments’ roles in later periods, and imposing hierarchies of significance on our interpretation of them. The Avebury landscape as a ‘heritage asset’ is a case in point: the monument has been ‘preserved’ as a composite ‘mythical moment’ of Neolithic and Bronze Age—and the significance of the monuments in later periods is ignored (Hughes 2021: 9).
Ruination and abandonment may lead to memories and meanings associated with monuments being forgotten or disrupted, but this does not remove the agency of these places. Instead, ruination makes monuments sites for haunting: that is, places that may be poorly understood and which may affect the present in unexpected ways (Derrida 1994). Such places of uncertainty are places where ‘spirits thrive […] in conditions of doubt rather than belief.’ (Bubandt 2017: 125). Haunting radically alters our conception of how earlier monuments impact later peoples’ lives, experiences, and cosmologies by acknowledging the agency of monuments as loci of uncertainty. I suggest that the monuments at Avebury became such places of doubt in the Iron Age-Roman period: spiritually dangerous, and in need of continuing boundary-work, exemplified by a sanctuary, constructed beyond the Winterbourne but with an eye on the henge. I will finish by thinking about the role that digital technologies such as VR and AR can have in helping us to visualise and imagine parts of the past that are forgotten and overlooked.
Integrating landscape-scale prospection, high-definition 3D GPR and targeted excavation at a newly discovered Romano-Celtic temple in Somerset
Speakers: Jodie Lewis (University of Bradford), Michael Pisz (University of Bradford)
Recent archaeological investigations on the Mendip Hills, Somerset, have revealed a complex multi-period landscape extending from prehistory to the post‑medieval period. Among the most significant findings is a previously unknown Romano-Celtic temple, located within a notable concentration of prehistoric monuments, offering new insights into long‑term ritual activity in this upland environment. This paper presents the results of two field seasons focused on the temple and the surrounding area. Remote sensing data, spatial analysis, and large-scale magnetometer survey provided a landscape-scale assessment and identified the wider archaeological setting of the temple complex. This broad prospection was followed by a high-definition 3D ground-penetrating radar survey, which enabled detailed characterisation of the subsurface remains and revealed the complexity of the temple at a much finer scale. These geophysical results were then tested through targeted excavation, creating an integrated workflow from landscape screening to detailed interpretation and ground-truthing. The results demonstrate how state‑of‑the‑art digital datasets can be integrated with excavation records to produce a more comprehensive reconstruction of buried features and their wider landscape context.
Identifying sacred sites in the rural landscape
Speaker: Stephen Clifton (University of Kent)
Are we sure that we understand what is happening in the rural areas of Roman Britain away from the urban centres and the military? There has been a tendency to characterise those complex Romano-British sites known as ‘villas’ along continental lines. Imagining a grand domestic establishment incorporating farming practices. Yet when we look more closely, many of the elements that we would expect to see are not present and there are other elements that we find difficult to explain using our current model. Digital modelling can be a useful tool to help us to reimagine these spaces in order to see how they would have been used so that we can better test out our models and theories. Using the well preserved site at East Farleigh in Kent, long characterised as a Roman Villa, we can see how the sacred rituals emerge from a reinterpretation of the evidence.
Londinium AD 215: imagining urban sacred space in Virtual Reality
Speakers: Dominic Perring (University College London), Jake Nixon (Historic VR)
A virtual reality experience, Londinium AD 215, will shortly launch on Steam. Over three years in the making, this offers a free-roaming VR and desktop experience across a digital reconstruction of an entire Roman city. It draws faithfully on the evidence of hundreds of geo-referenced archaeological investigations, but it still takes a considerable leap of imagination to rise above the fragmentary remains uncovered on City construction sites. The exercise has required us to overcome the limitations of both digital technologies and archaeological evidence to build credible urban landscapes and, in turn, to better visualise and understand the subject of our archaeological research. The ritual and sacred properties of the landscape are key to this reconstruction exercise. Not just in giving life to temples and shrines, including some whose existence is largely conjectural, but also because the city itself was designed as a theatre for religious and civic ritual. The need to recreate absolutely everything that might have been visible in Roman London has required us to develop new arguments and ideas about how the city functioned. This presentation – which will use case-studies drawn from London’s temple districts – will be our first opportunity to consider some of the lessons learned.
