The Roman tuffs revisited: local stone for the Eternal City

Data evento
16 April 2025

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

https://bsr.ac.uk/city-of-rome-the-roman-tuffs-revisited-local-stone-for-the-eternal-city/