Thread: I went to grad school to study Roman architecture. At one point I decided to research the use of wood in Roman buildings.

What I learned radicalized me as an environmentalist.

It starts simply: they developed the truss, and used to build Greek-style roofs, but bigger/1

This means that you can spread your supports farther out, and build larger uninterrupted interior spaces.

They got really good at this, and the roof of the Diribitorium (an old Senate hall) covered ~100 feet of open space. It could fit a regulation basketball court. /2

In order to do this, they used Larch wood, known for growing straight and being dense and strong. It wasn't native to the Italian Peninsula, so they imported them from the alps. The wood was too dense to float, so they carried 120-foot-long beams over land the entire trip. /3

Eventually, Roman structural ingenuity moved past wood. They started creating the amazing concrete vaults we still have today, like at the Pantheon and Basilica of Maxentius.

These buildings still used wood for scaffolding. It took forests to support that much curing concrete /4

But the wood was thrown away at the end of it all. It went from being a building material to being a consumable.

And here's where things really start to take a turn for the worse. /5

The late Roman Empire is known for its high quality of living. Within the city of Rome there were massive public bathing complexes with fresh water piped in from miles away. There was always fresh hot water and heated rooms (Caldaria). /6

The caldaria were heated by a hypocaust: the floor was supported by columns surrounded by empty space connected to a furnace. So they'd have a fire, and the hot air would fill the space beneath the floor, and they had underfloor heating. /7

It was an engineering marvel, and a large part of why the Roman Empire was able to keep the peace in Gaul. They could legitimately claim to be improving the lives of people who live through harsh European winters. /8

Of course, fires require fuel. At first, it worked pretty well: the timber used in construction could be repurposed as fuel. But eventually the demand outgrew the need, and by the 300s, ~90% of the virgin wood felled by Rome was used as fuel. /9

Eventually, they more or less clear-cut the entire Italian peninsula. They were importing wood from Malta and Tunis. But without forests, the mountainous peninsula began to suffer mass erosion. It devastated their agriculture, and they became even more dependent on imports. /10

So all of this plays into the political calculus when, in 330, Constantine moves the capital to Byzantium/Constantinople. Rome had lived beyond its means for too long, and the cost could no longer be justified. /11

But what I find, as an archaeologist, to be the most disturbing, is the siltification.

Ever wondered why Roman ruins are buried? It's because they clear-cut the forests as fuel for their comfortable lifestyle, which led to erosion, which led to repeated, silty, floods. /12

They caused an ecological collapse to maintain a life of comfort, then abandoned it all when said collapse literally began to erase their world. /end