Troad Granite Quarries
About
Roman quarrymen on Cigri Dag in the Troad opened working faces cutting a grey granite streaked with violet that shipped as monolithic column shafts across the empire. Demand for the stone ran heaviest between the 2nd and 6th centuries CE, putting Trajan's reign at the start of the quarry's busiest stretch. Geologists group the stone with the granites of Aswan and Mons Claudianus as one of antiquity's handful of major monolithic-column sources.
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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