The amphitheatres of Regio X –Venetia et Histria: the impact of stone supplying cost on ancient construction processes

It is well known that the supply of building materials and in particular of stone was one of the largest items of expenditure in ancient construction processes. It is also widely acknowledged that we lack detailed information about the cost of stone in the Roman age with the exception of some Mediterranean marbles. In the absence of other data, this cost can be quantified in terms of human energy, considering the effort required by the extraction, transport, and finishing activities. With the aim of better understanding the impact of stone supplying cost on ancient construction processes, this paper focuses on some amphitheatres of Regio X – Venetia et Histria which are similar in size and which were built at the beginning of the imperial age using locally quarried stone materials. It uses the available data about the quantity of stone employed in these buildings, the quarries exploited to get the stone, the transport routes, and the features of the different types of stone to quantify (in terms of human energy) the cost required to acquire these building materials. These results were then used to compare the resource expenditure for different stages in the supply of stone to understand to what extent and why the cost of stone varied