JEUDI 13 MARS 2025 à 18h
Amphi archéo (ACH0005) – Maison de l’archéologie – Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Samuel Holzman, Assistant Professor, Princeton University
The invention of the keystone frieze in Greek architecture: an early hellenistic « tipping point » in ancient structural engineering?
The use of flat arches (plate bande) in colonnades is a characteristic feature of Roman construction, appearing in major buildings in Rome beginning in the 1st century BCE. A new discovery on Samothrace, however, reveals the introduction of this building system almost two centuries earlier. In light of this new discovery, it now seems that his new way of building was not the result of gradual structural innovation in late Republican Rome. Instead, it illustrates a « tipping point » in structural thinking soon after the introduction of the masonry arch in Greece in the late 4th century BCE, which produced a cascade of new structural forms.