On Monday, April 19 at 6:00 pm, Mr. Seth Bernard (University of Pennsylvania, doctoral candidate) will speak on "Lifting and Labor in Roman Republican Architecture". The lecture will be in Woldenberg Art Center, room 210 (Stone Auditorium), on the Uptown Campus of Tulane University.
About the lecture
In ancient Rome, as in any pre-industrial society, building projects relied on the effort of human labor complimented by animal power and simple machines. The larger and heavier the building materials a construction project required, the more manpower that was needed to lug, haul, and lift that project to completion: seen in these terms, monumental architecture was one of the costliest enterprises in antiquity. How then did the construction of an impressive city such as Rome impact its urban population, which was no doubt involved in the building process? This paper seeks to understand the relationship between the process of construction and the social structures of Rome during the formative period of the Middle Republic (4th-2nd centuries BCE) when many urban aspects at Rome arose for the first time. In particular, I investigates the development of technology for heavy lifting—the most labor intensive components of Roman construction, and I present the results of fieldwork in Rome both tracking evidence for technological change and contextualizing that evidence in the social history of the period.
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