This lecture is part of the City of Rome programme, an intensive eight-week residential course coordinated by Dr. Christopher Stephen Siwicki, designed for postgraduates from selected British partner universities. The programme is aimed at students at the Master’s or early Doctoral level studying classical archaeology, art history, ancient history, and the transformation of antiquity in the Middle Ages and modern period.
The Roman tuffs revisited: local stone for the Eternal City
The seven hills of Rome and environs largely owe their origins to volcanic activity, which deposited vast quantities of geological material, much of it as various types of rocks known as tuffs. The ancient inhabitants of Rome began to exploit these local tuffs for building materials already in the Archaic period, rapidly acquiring knowledge of their virtues and defects and employing them in construction accordingly, balancing these against economic and logistic concerns. Although usually considered typical of the Archaic and Republican periods, such stones continued to be used throughout the Empire, both as cut stone and as aggregate in concrete structures, hidden behind veneers of marble and plaster. While extraction probably never ceased completely, tuff once again began to be quarried in large quantities to supply the building boom that followed the selection of Rome as the capital of a unified Italy in 1871, a fact that looms large in any archaeological attempt to study ancient extraction.
In the late 19th and early 20th century too began the historical and archaeological study of ancient Roman building materials, studies which have largely shaped the paradigms and typologies that still guide contemporary research. The lecture aims to sketch the development of different typologies and ways of thinking about the Roman tuffs over the past century and a half before turning to consider contemporary approaches including geochemical provenience and distribution studies, arriving finally to ask what the prospects for future research on ancient extraction in and around Rome look like.
Daniel P. Diffendale is research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He was previously a Rome Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and research fellow at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples. His recent research has focused on the extraction, working and use of soft stone, particularly volcanic tuff, in ancient Italy, though his academic interests range much more widely. Outside of Rome, he has participated in excavations at numerous sites in Italy, including Pompeii, Cumae, Metaponto, and Rossano di Vaglio. At the SNS he is studying the Roman extractive landscape as part of the ERC AdG project IN-ROME – The INscribed city: urban structures and interaction in imperial ROME.
See the full programme here.
