Ask the Experts

Our Experts, who have volunteered to share their time and information, include researchers, university professors, AIA Board members, ancient art historians, field archaeologists, museum specialists, architectural historians, and more – all with specialized knowledge of specific ancient cultures and subjects.

We have created a catalogue of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). In the FAQ section are answers to some of the questions archaeologists are most often asked, arranged by topic. If you want to know the meaning of a particular archaeological term, please check our online Glossary.

If you cannot find an answer in the FAQ, please leave a comment! Please be patient, since our volunteer archaeologists are sometimes excavating, teaching, or otherwise occupied, and may not be able to respond immediately.

Comments

re: Italian columns

Submitted by webmaster on May 26, 2010.

If you were looking at Roman-era remains, I suspect what you saw was actually a type of plaster, not marble. Since it was expensive to make columns out of marble, the Romans sometimes cheated and made them out of bricks, then plastered them over, shaping the plaster with regular flutes to make it look like a carved marble column. Finally they would paint the columns to complete the illusion that they were expensive marble. You can see a great example of this in the basilica on the forum at Pompeii. Today most of the paint has come off, so it often times looks like a dull cement column, but if you look closely at places where the plaster has chipped away, you can actually see the bricks underneath.

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