Along with its many other innovations, the Roman Empire revolutionized architecture with never-before-seen features, such as large-scale arches and dome roofs. And many of these structures still stand today despite being more than 2,000 years old.None of it would have been possible without the Romans’ infallible building material: self-healing concrete. Now, an ancient construction site has revealed the recipe for creating this sturdy foundation.At the time Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, covering Pompeii in as much as 6 meters (19.7 feet) of volcanic ash, construction workers were in the process of repairing and renovating a house. International researchers excavated the site in 2023, revealing some completed walls and others that were half-built, as well as raw materials and tools.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“When I entered this archaeological site in Pompeii, everything was so vivid and also kind of perfectly preserved, to be able to just reconstruct clearly what was going on there,” said Admir Masic, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of a new study documenting the discovery. “They’re frozen in time. It’s literally a time capsule.”The findings, which were published December 9 in the journal Nature Communications, are the clearest evidence of mixing processes that the ancient Romans used to create concrete, according to a release from MIT — and they allow researchers to “make conclusions that we were not able to make, or at least not with this certainty about the Roman technology,” Masic told CNN.Uncovering an active construction siteAbout one-third of Pompeii remains to be excavated, enabling scientists to continue making new discoveries about the ancient Roman way of life. The active construction site described in the new study was first investigated in the late 1880s, but excavations were halted and did not begin again until 2023. It was then that Masic’s team realized the magnitude of its discovery.“This is typical for Pompeii. Archaeologists are just slowly but surely, you know, uncovering parts,” Masic said. “I think there is this kind of standard, very cautious way of excavating, because once excavated, you actually break that time capsule and things start to degrade. … You basically remove that protection that ensures that everything is perfectly preserved.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdv …
