Much attention has been paid to the long-distance transport of marble and other hard stones as building materials in the Roman world. Soft stones, such as the many varieties of volcanic tuff, however, also moved as well (albeit only on the order of 25–300 km, as opposed to extremes approaching 3000 km for some hard stones). Soft stones had many advantages in non-decorative contexts: their relatively low densities made them easier to quarry and shape (sparing the quantities of iron required for upkeep of tools, moreover), and easier to move, in particular by boat.

The paper will look at three geographic case-studies on the relationship between “local” soft stones and waterborne transport: the city of Rome, the Bay of Naples, and the Rhine Valley, considering how the different scales of demand affected the landscapes of exploitation. While simple diffusionary models of technology transfer from an Urban center to provincial peripheries have in recent decades rightly been problematized, it is clear that the Roman army was instrumental in setting up a regional infrastructure for the quarrying and transport of squared stone along the Rhine frontier, where there are no local precedents. Such an infrastructure finds parallels in Italy, in particular around Rome and the Bay of Naples, where riverine and maritime networks had long been established for the transport of soft-stone building materials. What is more, the specialized practice of underground or gallery quarrying, attested in the extraction of the Rhenish Römertuffs, is rarely found in the exploitation of non-decorative stones, but has precedents in the quarries around Rome and Naples. The engineers and legionaries who arrived in the Eifel region to extract volcanic tuff during the early Empire were drawing on centuries of accumulated knowledge. The gradual removal of quarries for “local” building stone away from the urban center, a process which began in Rome at the end of the Archaic period (as attested by recent geochemical proveniencing work), also saw its culmination in the Imperial-period Rhenish stone network.