Pompeii's ruins challenge Rome's famous concrete recipe

Popular Science ^ | December 9, 2025 | Andrew Paul

[SunkenCiv]

For once, new research on the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii is not focusing on the destructive aftermath of the infamous Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 CE. Instead, it centers on the creative acts preceding it. After taking a closer look at the city's construction projects, a team from MIT believes that ancient Rome's legendary concrete recipe might need a major historical revision.

When ancient Roman architecture comes to mind, the columns and coliseums are generally the first things that pop into your head. These structures were often built using Roman concrete -- and that material traces back to a single man named Vitruvius. The 1st century BCE engineer is widely credited for authoring De Archtectura, the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, and his recipe for concrete helped construct some of the empire's most iconic buildings.

In 2023, MIT engineer Admir Masic and colleagues published the results of their research into surviving Roman concrete. They confirmed that the composite was manufactured by first mixing lime fragments with volcanic ash and other dry materials. Adding water to this blend then produced heat at a chemical level in a process known as "hot-mixing." As the concrete set, it preserves bits of the reactive lime as tiny, gravel-like stones. When the concrete inevitably cracked over time, the lime then redissolves and fills in the fissures -- granting the material its famous self-healing properties.

[Texan5]

Thank you for the interesting article-I’ll check back when the conversation returns to concrete instead of being an argument of faith based on BC and AD versus BCE and CE-which have nothing in common with the concrete in the article...

In the 80’s, I made the move from public sector case worker to private sector employment-I enrolled in courses to add to my degree in social work, to become a workers comp case manager and adjuster. I was working days in the HR dept of a large construction company that had invented a better method of pouring/curing concrete tilt-up walls. I was interested, so I learned to work with concrete, and enjoyed that. My engineer 1st husband liked to work with concrete-so I like concrete-still work with it once in a while..

[Texan5]

I’ll agree-crank it up...

[Texan5]

Thanks for the logical take-but you might be called a heretic by a poster, soon...

[rellic]

Thanks for the Latin education, I took Mandarin in school. What is BC in Latin?

[rellic]

BTW; BC Should be AC.

[Albion Wilde]

Chemically self-healing concrete,. So amazing!

We in the modern era think so much of our man-made inventions are fairly recent; but if one reads the Bible's descriptions of Solomon's Temple, how detailed the measurments, materials and finishings were required and used, and that it was constructed between the 6th and 10th centuries BC, we can look on the Romans' use of concrete in a 2nd Century AD temple—the Pantheon—as stunningly modern!

The time distance between Solomon's Temple and the Pantheon was between 610 to 840 years, To us today, that's a time span between now and somewhere between 1186 and 1416 AD — around the time that Notre Dame was first built, without power tools.

On my first visit to Rome, I had no knowledge of the ancient Romans' use of concrete-- I thought everything was made either of cut stone or marble, or some type of clay brick.I had watched my own uncle drive up to our house in 1950 with his concrete mixing truck rotating, and then pour our porch floor—gasp! A modern miracle! But in the late 60s at age 21, I walked into the Pantheon, gazed up at its incredible molded concrete ceiling of its dome, assembled over four years in around year 138 AD, and nearly fainted in awe.