Cavatori di pietra e cave dell'Attica

A survey of all entries concerning the supply of stone blocks in building accounts and specifications from Classical Athens shows that overseers of public projects could entrust all tasks related to quarrying, transporting, and placing stones blocks to a single worker or split them in two or three portions. Moreover, they could employ simultaneously different systems of labor recruitment, including in-house management, direct hiring, building contracts and business partnerships, in order to complete the job as efficiently as possible. However, contrary to what is often believed, the various terms occurring in these entries, such as λιθοτόμοι, τομὴ τῶν λίθων and τιμὴ τοῦ λίθου, do not signal any difference in the legal status of the quarries from which the stone was derived and cannot prove the existence of private quarries alongside the public and sacred quarries attested in the epigraphic record. In fact, all suppliers and quarrymen were either lessees of public quarries or contractors to whom overseers assigned quarries in the project’s endowment from which to extract stone. While no evidence exists so far of private quarries, the epigraphic evidence confirms the economic importance of the stone industry in Attica and the many investment opportunities available in this sector.