Quarrying and construction operations in Aeolian Larisa with a reference to “building technology” and “building economy”

Abstract

Building technology and building economy concepts are relatively new and important research subjects in archaeology. While the term “building technology” refers to technical processes and methods of construction operations such as exploitation, transportation, processing and fine dressing; “building economy” focuses on costs and consumption of resources or quantification of labor forces and costs, etc. Either way main purpose is to apprehend the background of the operations. These studies involve several researchers from various disciplines and each of them contribute according to their expertise, which ease to enrich these research areas. Quarries are initial points of construction operations and they provide useful information regarding building technology and building economy. In Larisa, observations on quarrying and as well as construction processes proceed cordially with the ongoing architectural field surveys which are being conducted since 2010. Observations have showed that every rock cluster in and around the Larisa settlement have been used as a natural resource material for the constructions. More than a hundred traces of stone extraction have been identified and have been documented through drawings and photographs. Besides, most of them have been manually recorded by a handheld GPS and were gathered in a detailed catalogue, according to their places. Thus, the applied method and the entire quarrying process can clearly have been identified through these traces. According to these marks, it is understood that levering and splitting were principal stone exploiting methods that were used in Larisa which have been applied by the entire Mediterranean & Mesopotamian civilizations throughout the centuries.