Romans’ hot recipe for self-healing concrete unravelled in Pompeii

Construction material uncovered by archaeologists in Pompeii has revealed that the Romans used ‘hot mixing’ to make concrete, new chemical analyses suggest.¹ The building materials and tools were discovered abandoned in rooms that were under construction when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, destroying the city.

‘I walked into an excavation in Pompeii a year-and-a-half ago and it was like travelling back in time to a construction site in the Roman empire,’ says Admir Masic, a chemist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led the research. ‘There were untouched piles of construction material vividly preserved.’