Building stones and clay-rich Nile mud were ancient Egypt’s main raw construction materials. While the mud was easily accessible along the Nile river valley, the immense quantities of the different stone materials used for construction of the famous pyramids, precious temples and tombs needed a systematic quarrying organization, well arranged transport logistics over extreme distances and a hig...

The quality properties of andesite (Unit Volume Weight, Uniaxial Compression Strength, Los500, etc.) are required to determine the exploitable blocks and their sequence of extraction. However, the number of samples that can be taken and analyzed is restricted, and thus the quality properties should be estimated at unknown locations. Cokriging has been traditionally used in the estimation of spa...

In some climates, massive buildings made of stone, masonry, concrete, earth and … can be utilized as one of the simplest and most effective ways of reducing building heating and cooling loads. Very often such savings could be achieved in the design stage of the building and with a relatively low-cost. Such declines in building envelope heat losses combined with optimized material configurati...

The reconstruction of the chronology of historical buildings is a tricky issue, as usually there are not historical documents that allow the assessment of construction phases, and some materials are hardly reliable for the use of dating techniques (e.g., stone). However, in the last two decades, important advances on the use of absolute dating methods on building materials have increased the po...