History of building where Caesar was killed written in its mortar
New research has confirmed the different construction phases of the building where Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, 44 BC.
A team of researchers studied thirteen samples of mortar collected from different masonry structures of the Curia of Pompey the Great (or Curia Pompeia) and from three mixtilinear basins located within the Sacred Area of Largo Argentina of Rome.
The work was a collaboration between the University of Córdoba, the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology of Italy, and Sapienza University in Rome.
The report, by Fabrizio Marra, Ersi-lia D’Ambrosio, Mario Gaeta, and Antonio Monterroso-Checa, is published as “Petrographical and geochemical criteria for a chronology of Roman mortars between the first century BC and the second century AD: The Curia of Pompey the Great’ in The University of Oxford’s prestigious journal Archaeometry.
The study reveals that the first of the mortar samples was mixed during
