Teos Africano Marble Quarries
About
Quarries at Karagöl, three kilometers northeast of Teos in Ionia, produced a black marble streaked with white, red, and green veins that Romans called marmor luculleum, or africano, after the general Lucullus who reportedly brought it to Rome's attention in the 1st century BCE. The material's prestige and limited output kept the quarries under close, likely imperial, control. Blocks shipped from Teos's harbor reached Rome and other major cities as accent stone for columns and floor inlay. Modern surveys traced the main extraction site to the shore of the small lake at Karagöl, three kilometers from the ancient city.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
Sources
Nearby
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