Event

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New fieldwork at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the Greek island of Samothrace has uncovered the remains of flat arches in the Doric frieze of the Stoa, a long portico built in the second quarter of the 3rd century BCE. The keystone frieze was used prominently in large-scale building in Rome and exemplifies how Roman architecture creatively combined Greek trabeated aesthetics with the arch’s structural potential. The keystone frieze discovered on Samothrace, however, predates by one and a half centuries examples known in Italy. This talk queries whether flat relieving arches were more widely deployed in Greek architecture but have gone overlooked. Other early-hellenistic buildings on Samothrace tested the limits of stone spans and set the stage for structural innovation. The Stoa reveals a decisive transition between relieving devices based on cantilevers in 5th- and 4th-century BCE Athens and the wider adoption of plate-bande construction in late-Republican Rome.