 One of the most famous places where marble has been used in history is of course in ancient Rome and in the Mediterranean area. So this marble, as I mentioned earlier, starts its life out as limestone. And one of the primary ways that large quantities of limestone are produced is that they are sea floor sediments. They're chemical sediments that are precipitated out of sea water. They form from a combination of shells of small organisms living in the water that die and drop their shells to the sea floor. These dissolve and recrystallize and form massive deposits of limestone on the sea floor. The Mediterranean area has been oceanic for a long, long time. Now the Mediterranean sea hasn't always been the seaway that's been there. In fact, there is a much older sea that predates the Mediterranean called the Tethys Sea. And it was in this Tethys Sea that the carbonates that form what are now the Mediterranean energy and marbles were first laid down. And then as that sea closed due to subduction and plate tectonics, there was a great metamorphic event that is responsible among many other things for forming the Alps and many of the other mountainous bodies around the Mediterranean and around that part of Europe. The sea floor sediments at that point were subjected to very high pressures and temperatures and recrystallized to form the marbles that were then later exploited once the sea had opened back up again to make the young Mediterranean, the new Mediterranean sea, and this became a center of culture with high demand for these type of materials. So I mentioned in our introduction about marble and its use in sculpture, but I hope some of you were thinking also, hey, what about architecture? One of the most famous buildings made of marble is the Parthenon in Athens. And there were many, many Greek temples made out of marble, and the Greeks exploited the marble from particular quarries, very famous ones in antiquity. The Romans went one step further and as they were colonizing what would become the Roman Empire, one of the things that they would do is they would use imported marble columns for the facades of temples, for the fronts of temples as a way of showing Roman power and Roman wealth because they would build the most of the temple out of local stone, sometimes limestone, and then they would bring in all of the columns just for the porch and some of the sculpture around that porch area. And that would be of Carrara marble or from marble from one of these other famous antique quarries like the Perian marble or the Naxian marble. And the whole point of this was that they would bring in these enormous column shafts as proof that Rome had the ability to quarry these, ship them whole, bring them across sea and land, and then erect them at this building all in a very short space of time. And that's an incredible amount of expense that they were going to, and this was purely to demonstrate to those citizens the power of the Roman Empire and its systems.