Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I don't think the Romans did calculations like modern civil engineers.  They didn't have materials with known tension, compression, torsion, and tensile values like steel girders.  They were forced to work with local stone, mortar, bricks.  They guesstimated from great experience how to support large structures like some of the aqueducts still around.

Yeah, and I think there was much more emphasis on experience and methods than calculation in a lot of things in those times. Over time they'd learned "if you do it THIS way, the building doesn't fall down, and if you do it THAT way, the building falls down", so they handed down over generations doing it THIS way is the right way. 

I think a lot of things back then were very method/process dependent. I think back to brewing beer, which has been done for 5,000 years and possibly as many as 10,000. How do you brew beer when you don't even know what yeast is? Well, you don't need to know what yeast is if you know "what works" and "what doesn't work". If you merely repeat a process that is known to work over and over, you can get moderately consistent results. And the process is handed down generation to generation. 

much of today's engineering is over engineered by a large margin because

except for bridge pier protection apparently 

I suspect bridge piers will get a lot of funding.

On a somewhat related note, I see these fancy "lifts" at pools now on the occasion that a wheel chair bound individual wants to swim.

ADA mandate.  The alternative is a zero-depth entry.  Zero depth entry is simpler and has less maintenance but it is nearly impossible to retrofit onto an existing pool.