[MUSIC] Hello, everybody, I'm Sarah. Today I'm here to talk to you about one of the most interesting and peculiar fields of activity of Roman archaeology. I'm talking about architecture and building techniques. This field of activity is so important. Architecture in general is so important because we are what we built. We live in what we built. And so, from the analysis of ancient architecture, we are able to gain a large amount of information about people who build buildings, their lifestyle and their necessities. It is very easy for us to recognize buildings from their own shape. For example, this is a collection of examples from modern architecture of course. It is easy for us to recognize a stadium, from a mall, from a nice house on the beach depending on the shape of these buildings or depending on the materials used for the construction. This same identical process can be applied to ancient architectures too. Architecture as a building in general should have three main characteristics. The first one is the solidity, the strength of the walls, the strength of the structures. A building should be solid, a building should be resistant. The second one is the usefulness. A building should be comfortable for people who use it for people who go inside it. And third, why not a building should be beautiful. Ancient people had this three characteristics for their own buildings too. They called it firmitas for the solidity, utilitas for the usefulness, and Venustas for the beauty. Investigating these three categories, we can gain a large amount of information about the necessities of Asian people in the moment of construction, about the lifestyle of these people. There are many categories of information that we can gain from the analysis of structures and from the analysis of architecture. I will now try to show you some particular fields of interest. The first one is the materials that were used in antiquity for building. They are quite important because they show a great change during time and depending on places and space. The most ancient buildings in the Roman world were built with perishable materials. The roof, as you can see in this image, were constructed with vegetal materials sub stained by wood branches. For the elevations for the walls the Romans used at the beginning, just clay or other kind of earth other kind of soil pressed and sustained by wood poles. The pavements were made of beaten ground or beaten and powdered pieces of stones. This is what archaeologists usually find as a trace of these structures. They are very small, usually especially in height, because of the nature of these materials, which is, as I already said, perishable. In some cases, and especially during the 7th century BCE, some roughly cut pieces of stone start to be employed into structures. At first to give more solidity to the foundations, like in this example. Or just like in this another case, to make some kind of a basement, some kind of a plant to the elevation wall to provide safety from the humidity coming from the ground. This roughly cut pieces of stone where, probably during the 6th century BCE substituted by a more precisely cut kind of block. We can actually call this kind of structure a block structure because the carvers gained now, finally, the ability to coat the stone with a precise rectangular shape. This example comes from the Capitolinus, and it's the basement, the podium, the basement of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Moreover during the centuries and gradually, with the expansion of the Roman territory, new queries of stone were found a nucleus of some were used. So new kinds of stone, even more resistant could be introduced into Roman architecture, with the possibility to create even more elaborate kinds of structures like this arc inside the Serbian walls in the Aventine. But the most characteristic and important invention of Roman architecture is for sure the concrete of cement. The concrete is a mixture of a mortar and of some aggregate or inert, which were usually roughly cut pieces of stone or broken ties or broken bricks. The concrete collects together the three categories of firmitas, solidity, usefulness and beauty. In particular, the solidity is assured by the incredible strength of the concrete. In fact, most of the buildings which we have nowadays preserved of the Roman architecture, is made of concrete. The usefulness is clear because to put in place and will in concrete is much faster than an old war in blocks. And third, the beauty in some examples, and in particular in the elevations, the concrete was covered by two revetments on the two sides. These revetments were made usually with stone faces or with block, or sorry with brick pieces. And in some examples, this revetment, this cover was so beautiful that the Romans loved to see this kind of decoration inside their own houses. But the materials in particular in Roman architecture, where in some cases of second hand, this is another important feature of the archaeological study of architecture. And it's extremely peculiar of the Roman architecture because we do not have this reuse, this recycle of building materials so much today. In Roman architecture he had at first an economic reason. But it is so important for us, for the archaeologists, because it gives us a lot of information about what was there before the new building. What was destroyed for the construction of the new buildings, reusing recycling these materials. And it gives us information also on the availability of materials which change it during time and space. I hope you like this lesson. See you soon. Bye.