The Wooden Carpentry of Roofs in Mediterranean Antiquity

The truss adopts the rational configuration of the non-deformable triangle, optimizing the exploitation of the wooden members’ resistance resources. It is an extremely efficient structural typology that has gone through the centuries in its almost primitive configuration without substantial modifications, for which finding comparisons in the history of construction is difficult. But when was the truss born? This is the first general-interest book to address this question.

Using scant but precious ancient literary documentation, the archaeological finds and the iconography of the figurative products that reproduce roofs, the book traces the gradual evolution process of the roof carpentry that led to such an invention. New hypotheses are advanced on the technical achievements of the main Mediterranean civilizations – Egyptian, Minoan and Mycenaean, Phrygian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman – in a broad and ambitious excursion that crosses the whole of Antiquity. The book is accompanied by a rich illustrative apparatus that includes historical and original photographs as well as numerous explanatory drawings.