Before the 7th century B.C. most of the buildings were constructed with sun dried bricks and wood and wood and thatch was used for their roofing. However, at the beginning of the 7th century, the introduction of the clay tiles, which had a significant weight, imposed the use of more resistant -and hence heavier- beams in the wooden structure of the roof. Consequently, the supporting members had to be built firmer and more resistant. The sun dried bricks were replaced by stone blocks and the wooden columns by stone or marble ones. The theory among the scholars, that the Greeks were inspired for their stone buildings by the Egyptians used to prevail. However, there is nothing in common between the Greek and the Egyptian architecture in the techniques of the stone usage, in the application of the clay tiles, in the details of the columns, or finally in the architectural orders that were developed in both civilizations. Therefore, nowadays, it is considered more probable that, in the Greek world, the transition from the brick buidings to the stone ones was owed to the combination of new tectonic and aesthetic necessities. In addition, many Mycenaean achievements in the field of masonry were apparent even during the early Archaic period, and it is generally agreed that they had more impact on Greek architecture than some vague Egyptian influences did.

The materials that were used in masonry, to replace the bricks, were mainly local limestone or porous stone and later on different varieties of marble. Its best examples come from public buildings -often fortifications- as in the temples the sculptured decoration and their architectural design were more important than the masonry itself. The stone blocks supported one another only with their weight, that is without the use of binding material. However, the masons achieved a perfect binding of the edges of the blocks. Binding mortar started to be widely used during the Hellenistic period.

In the processing stage of the stone blocks the Greeks used the technique of anathyrosis to reduce the necessary work, and hence the construction time and cost. This technique was already known to the Myceneans, who perhaps had borrowed it from the Egyptians. During anathyrosis only the surface sections were polished near the edges, so as to fit together, while the rest of the surface underwent only a slight moulding and a rough processing.

However, in order to avoid the horizontal shifting of blocks, since seismic activity was always intense in the Greek areas, metallic joints (dowels and clamps) of different shapes were used. They were usually made of iron and rarely of bronze, and were placed in special rectangular cuttings in stone, were fixed with lead and hence they ensured the cohesion of the courses. This contributed to the destruction of many ancient buildings during the Middle Ages, with the purpose of extracting these metal elements.

The ancient Greeks invented and used various masonry methods and according to each period or building type demonstrated their special preference for some of these. During Archaic times the polygonal masonry system was widely spread, a specific version of which was called Lesbian, because of the best surviving examples at the acropolis of Lesbos. In fact Lesbian masonry was in use along the coastline of Asia Minor and in parts of the islands and the mainland of Greece, during the 7th and most of the 6th century B.C. In Lesbian masonry the blocks are polygonal as well, but some of their edges are curvilinear. In Attica polygonal masonry reached its zenith in the middle of the 6th century B.C. and led to the invention of another system, the isodomic, which started to prevail at the end of the Archaic period and developed into various forms.