The concrete used was self-healing and anachronistically green
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskRoman work of another sort has survived the centuries, too. “De Architectura” is a ten-book series by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, an engineer and architect of the first century, who is believed by many scholars to have worked with Julius Caesar on some of his military campaigns. These volumes include various tips intended to ensure that buildings “don’t fall into ruins over a long passage of time”.
Part of the explanation lies in the volcanic rocks of areas such as the Alban Hills, south-east of Rome, and Pozzuoli, near Naples. These provided crucial ingredients. As Vitruvius himself describes, the cement Romans used to bind the aggregates of concrete was a mixture of lime and volcanic ash. The researchers studied how leucite, a potassium-rich volcanic mineral, dissolved in the water and reconfigured the chemical bonds between the cement and the aggregates, strengthening the interfaces between them, and making the whole structure more resilient.
The lime involved here was not the pure white powder described by Vitruvius. Rather, it was clumps a millimetre or so across that had failed to dissolve when the concrete was being prepared. Such clumps are often found in Roman concrete. Their role seems to have been as a reservoir of calcium carbonate for the processes of self-healing, permitting that material to be dissolved by seeping water admitted by tiny cracks and then re-precipitated in those cracks to seal them up.
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