Concealing Structural Innovation in Greek Architecture: Flat-Arch Construction in the Third-Century BCE Stoa on Samothrace
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract New fieldwork at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the Greek island of Samothrace has uncovered the remains of flat arches in the Doric frieze of the Stoa, a long portico built in the second quarter of the third century BCE. The keystone frieze was used prominently in large-scale building in Rome and exemplifies how Roman architecture creatively combined Greek trabeated aesthetics with the structural potential of the arch. The keystone frieze discovered on Samothrace, however, predates by one and a half centuries examples known in Italy. This article queries whether flat relieving arches were more widely deployed in Greek architecture but have gone overlooked. Other early Hellenistic buildings on Samothrace tested the limits of stone spans and set the stage for structural innovation. The Stoa reveals a decisive transition between the relieving devices based on cantilevers used in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athens and the wider adoption of plate-bande construction in late Republican Rome.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".