This paper presents the opportunities of GIS analysis supported by Spearman’s correlation method for answering the question whether in the western, Latin part of the Roman Empire there are spatial continuations between the ancient Roman waterbody-connected cults of Isis and Neptune on one hand and the late antique Christian cult of saint Mary on the other.

In the last years there is a trend of studies using geographical analysis for investigating connections of various ancient phenomena including the cults of Graeco-Roman gods. Hovewer, spatial proximity between two phenomena measured as distances in kilometers alone is not sufficient evidence of their connection until we compare this proximity with other selected as well as random phenomena and test it statistically.

There is an older scholarly tradition suggesting a connection between the Graeco-Roman cult of Isis and the late antique Christian cult of holy Mary, Mother of Christ, often emphasizing shared maternal characteristics. The correlation between the two cults in certain areas associated with seafaring may seem somewhat surprising. One may ask whether the late antique cult of Mary did not respond to the old needs of seafarers.

Religious language is ripe with metaphors, from "The Lord is my Shepherd" of the Psalms to the "Wheel of Dharma", from the Manichean "Light Soul'' to the Daoist "Way". But also the idea of "metaphor" itself possesses a conceptual history spanning several thousand years. Metaphor has been understood as a linguistic phenomenon, as a rhetorical device of communication, and even as a fundamental building block of human cognition. Any study of metaphor in the humanities thus needs to start with explicating its understanding of metaphor.

In our work, we examine metaphors as fundamental instruments of religious meaning-making. We understand religion as a socially mediated system that relies on mediating between the transcendent and the immanent through communication. For our comparative work on the dynamics of this process, we collect religious metaphors within a knowledge graph following Open Linked Data principles. In this paper, we will present our domain ontology that reflects our understanding of metaphor, and demonstrate how it allows us to address our research questions across linguistic boundaries and different religious traditions.

The concepts of location, place and space are central to the study of archaeology and heritage, and furthermore inherently multi-disciplinary. The activities and relationships to place are therefore a key element to the palimpsestic make-up of the historic environment, and in combination can help develop the understanding of the space we inhabit today. As such they are fundamental to the relationship we build with our surroundings, both academically and colloquially.

As part of the ATRIUM project, this paper presents the development of a demonstrator for using GIS based software and open sourced data, for linking and visualising multi-disciplinary spatial data. This is the outcome of international collaboration between the Swedish national Data Service at the University of Gothenburg and the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York. The goal is to link and visual a dataset of agraro-historical data from parish registers in the Swedish county of Östergötland, to combine with archaeological and historical data from varying sources to develop a curiosity-driven methodology that can be followed by various actors. The goal was not therefore to answer a specific question, but to highlight what can be done with data reuse and visualisation, and to inspire a range of new audiences to explore the links to physical space with tangible historical and archaeological assets.