Ancient Roman Mausoleum No Match for Earthquake

Study concludes that damaged monument resulted from earthquake, not rock fall.
The Romans built their monuments solidly enough to last for millennia, but not without the wear and tear that time, elements and events can produce to turn pristine structures into romantic ruins. Such is the case for a Roman mausoleum that was built below a sheer cliff, commanding a well-designed view of the forum and castle that spread below it in the ancient city of Pinara in Turkey.
In this case, according to researchers at the University of Cologne, much of its damage was caused by an earthquake. It had been knocked off-kilter, its massive building blocks shifted and part of its pediment collapsed. At first, archaeologists and seismologists were not certain how the mausoleum sustained its damage. An earthquake seemed likely, but the mausoleum is also built under a cliff honeycombed with numerous other tombs, and damage from a rockfall seemed possible. To make the determination, research leader Klaus-G. Hinzen and colleagues mapped the position of each part of the mausoleum using laser scans, and transferred 90 million data points collected from the scans into a 3-D computer model of the tomb. They then ran several damage simulations on the 3-D model, concluding that rockfall was not a likely cause of damage, but that an earthquake with magnitude 6.3 would be sufficient to produce the observed damage pattern to the mausoleum's heavy stone blocks.
 http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/march-2013/article/ancient-roman-mausoleum-no-match-for-earthquake