Daniel P Diffendale
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
Rethinking the Roman Tuffs: Introducing the QUADRATA Project
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Abstract
Ancient Roman architecture has a global legacy, but its early development was shaped by highly specific, local factors. One crucial feature in this development was the exploitation of the various volcanic stones ("tuffs") found within a 25 km radius of the center of Rome. Already in the Archaic period (sixth century B.C.E.), the tuff bedrock of Rome's seven hills was being quarried for architectural use; by the Late Republic (first century B.C.E.) at the latest, Roman architects were building with a variety of tuffs quarried well beyond the city's limits, some from the territories of bested former rivals. Roman architecture of the Archaic and Republican periods developed in dialogue with its Etruscan and Latin neighbors, many of whom similarly employed locally quarried tuffs. None of Rome's neighbors, however , came to employ such a wide variety of tuffs, nor did they generally import nonlocal materials. The differing physical properties of the various tuffs allowed Roman builders to experiment, and by the late third century B.C.E. at the latest, they were strategically employing different tuffs to meet specific constructional and decorative needs. Despite decades of archaeological and historiographic work in Rome and its tufaceous catchment area, however, contemporary understanding of tuff use still relies on century-old studies: Tenney Frank's groundbreaking "Notes on the Servian Wall," which established the basic tuff typology used by archaeologists today, was published in 1918 (AJA 22: 175-88). Frank's classification was based largely on macroscopic identification of tuffs; as the results of recent geochemical studies have proven, however, visual inspection alone is insufficient to provenance tuff reliably. Nor is extraction of mineral resources simply a material correlate of the expansion of Roman state power, contrary to Frank's hypotheses. Given recent advances in archaeological science and decades of historiographic reflection, the time is ripe for a comprehensive restudy of the Roman tuffs. Accordingly , we have undertaken a new project, "QUarry provenance and Archaeological Dating of the Roman-Area Tuffs in Antiquity." QUADRATA combines a campaign of trace-element analysis, in order to pinpoint provenience of various tuffs from known ancient quarries in the hinterland of Rome, with a consideration of the Republican architectural contexts employing tuff and a historiographic study of early Roman construction and resource extraction. A pilot study involving geo-chemical and petrographic analysis of tuffs from the temples of Fortuna and Mater Matuta at Sant'Omobono has already been completed. We will discuss some of the implications of the results of this study, along with challenges and prospects for future work.
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