Quote:
Originally Posted by JK47
The problem was that the techniques and knowledge was lost, along with most written records, when most of Rome burned between the 4th and 8th centuries. Not to mention the general reduction in literacy.
It wasn't until recently that we were able to determine the chemical composition. That said we still lack information on the ratios used to create the mixtures that comprise concrete...which is all the more difficult since...as said above...they tended to vary it as they went.
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Decline in literacy between then and now?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/295333?...n_tab_contents
Literacy in the Roman provinces varied between five to ten percent, with some areas achieving up to twenty percent.
https://www1.umassd.edu/ir/resources...n/literacy.pdf
Literacy in the Middle Ages was not appreciably below that of the Roman era (using England as an example), even if there was a slight drop, and we've since risen far above that of the Roman era.
https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp#3
Literacy in the United States is around an order of magnitude above that.
Ergo, I doubt literacy really played into this loss of knowledge. Rather, nobody had access to the knowledge at all because it was burned and lost. And even if literacy declined, some people were still literate. If the records still existed, somebody literate would have been around to perpetuate the knowledge.