Question

For decades, the prevailing historiography of late antique architecture interpreted the widespread incorporation of *spolia*—repurposed architectural elements such as columns and capitals—as an unambiguous symptom of systemic economic contraction and the atrophying of artisanal guilds. According to this traditionalist paradigm, the cannibalization of older monuments was a strictly utilitarian response to material scarcity. In the late twentieth century, however, a revisionist school forcefully challenged this narrative, arguing instead that *spolia* functioned primarily as a sophisticated ideological apparatus. By embedding the architectural vestiges of antiquity into new structures, this school contended, later rulers intentionally appropriated the legitimacy and imperial aura of their predecessors.

While this ideological framework successfully illuminates the programmatic use of *spolia* in highly visible civic commissions, it overextends itself by attempting to establish a universal theory of architectural reuse. Specifically, the revisionist model founders when confronted with the archaeological reality of subterranean foundations, where *spolia* were routinely deployed with zero visual exposure. That builders expended considerable labor to transport massive repurposed stones merely to bury them suggests a more nuanced reality. While ideological resonance was undoubtedly exploited in visible contexts, it was ultimately a secondary dividend; the primary driver of reuse across all contexts remained the pragmatic economic calculus of material acquisition, a factor which the revisionists too hastily dismissed.

Which one of the following inferences is most strongly supported by the passage?