A Town Built to Last: Fernie, Fire, and the Stone of the Elk Valley

Walk through downtown Fernie and you’ll notice something unusual for a small mountain town: block after block of solid brick and stone. Most towns this size in the Canadian Rockies grew up in timber and stayed that way. Fernie didn’t — and the reason is written into...

Cyclopean Masonry

Cyclopean masonry is a type of stonework found in Mycenaean architecture, built with massive limestone boulders, roughly fitted together with minimal clearance between adjacent stones and with clay mortar or no use of mortar. The boulders typically seem unworked, but...

Roman Stonemasonary

What Made Roman Stonemasonry Distinctive? Roman stonemasons inherited techniques from the Greeks and Etruscans and subsequently pushed the craft to new engineering and architectural heights. Their work ranged from finely carved marble monuments to massive utilitarian...

Rare Dacian stonemason’s tool kit unearthed in Romanian quarry

An amazing archaeological discovery in Romania is throwing new light on the advanced stoneworking skills of the Dacians, an ancient civilisation that thrived in the Carpathian region prior to the Roman conquest. While trekking in a forested area near Hunedoara...