Five workers power a crane to hoist building materials to the roof of one of Rome’s monuments, in this relief from the first or second century A.D. The carving was found in the tomb of the Haterii family in Rome; Quintus Haterius Tychicus, a freedman, was probably a building contractor who helped erect some of the multi-storied, marble-clad buildings that lined the Via Sacra, the main street of the Roman Forum. Passionate about machinery, the Romans used construction cranes like this one to build multi-level structures. The reason they could put up such large buildings was that they had […]
