After taking a closer look at the city’s construction projects, a team from MIT believes that ancient Rome’s legendary concrete recipe might need a major historical revision. A hot-mixing hot takeIn 2023, MIT engineer Admir Masic and colleagues published the results of their research into surviving Roman concrete. The evidence resides at an ancient Roman construction site preserved in great detail by the Mount Vesuvius eruption. Although the construction materials are over 2,000 years old, they remain as important as ever. While Vitruvius may have simply misinterpreted the era’s primary concrete recipe, De architectura still describes a strategy that strongly echoes the hot-mixing method seen in the authors’ studies.