The Danubian provinces as a topic in the historiography of classical archaeology and religious studies are present since the late 18th and early 19th century: the works of Johann Hübner from 1746, Johann Baptist Schels from 1820 and Ferdinand Stiefelhagen from 1854 already mentions this area. The first works focusing on the Donauländische provinzen and Danubian area were using this geographic and cultural unit mostly as a consequence of modern historiography and contemporary politics. Later, especially in the age marked by the monumental work of Th. Mommsen, the discovery of the Publicum Portorium Illyirici, as a powerful economic unit with a strong military network highlighted the importance of this area within the literature.
Later, during the early 20th century, the great catalogues and corpora of Mommsen, Cumont, Tudor and others focusing on the epigraphic and iconographic soures of Roman Empire in this area made this notion even more present in the literature. Not only the economic and military, but since the research of the so called Danubian Rider cults, the area became a unit of analysis also in religious studies.
A paradigmatic work was done by John Wilkes and Géza Alföldy, both of them defining the recent scholarship on this area of the Roman Empire. Recent studies and research institutes focusing on the Danubian area (LAD, Danuvius, Frontiers of the Roman Empire) mostly on its economic and military aspects.
This project is one of the few which will focus on aspects of religious communication in the Danubian area.
Photo: the Danubian area (source)