Legal and administrative aspects of the management of marble quarries in the Roman period

It is very difficult to give a systematic reconstruction of the management (ownership, administration and labour condition) of marble quarries in roman times in the extraction districts of south-western anatolia, because the sources are too fragmentary and discontinuous. indeed, there are no legislative or administrative documents indicating in detail the structures or bodies that were responsible for the management of the resources and workers. in the republican period, most of the quarries belonged to private owners or to municipal communities. Only in the imperial period, is it possible to see the exploitation of fully-fledged apparatus responsible for managing state-owned quarries. in most cases, the reconstruction of the organisation of the quarrying districts is based on indications drawn from the inscriptions on rock faces or carved blocks, where it is possible to see the formula ex ratione, the names of the officina and the head of the workmen who performed the caesura, the number of the locus and the so-called bracchium. regarding the extraction district of Hierapolis in particular, reconstruction of the quarries' administrative and managerial apparatus suggests that the marble quarries belonged mainly to private entrepreneurs or to the municipal community (or both) and served to meet local demand