Support structure below

A temporary supporting structure below the actual vault is the oldest known form of centering. Megalithic builders are known to have used earth filling the inside of a dolmen so that the top slab could be carried to its resting position; however, this may not be considered as a valid centering, because stereotomic structural efficiency is dependent on the accuracy of placement of voussoirs, requiring a more stable and geometrically informed falsework than a mound of earth.

Roman arches were often built using centerings built in wood, a flexible and easy to work material. This technique allowed them to build equal arches of stone along the length of aqueducts by reusing the same centering (Adam, 2005). In order to save woodwork, the archetypal wooden trussed semicircular arch centering would often be supported on lintels or cornices in the springer or even higher above in the case of a corbeled springer. Using trusses for centering for the construction of stone bridges has been common practice until as recently as 2001, as in the case of the 146 meter span stone Danhe bridge in China (“The bridge is 24.8 meters wide with an arch that rises 32.444 meters. The arch ring has a variable depth of 3.5 meters at the base to 2.5 meters at the crown. The total length of the bridge is 413.7 meters with 8 spans of 2×30 + 146 + 5×30 meters. The stones were used for the main arch ring in layers 36cm to 60cm deep. The total number of stone blocks amounted to 34,409 for the arch ring.” (Sakowski, 2014).

Although the aforementioned examples are mainly linear structures, spatial vaults such as barrel vaults also benefited from this system by translating it in an axis perpendicular to its plane. Between these arches, boards of wood aligned with the barrel vault axis would support the whole intrados surface for stones to be placed until the system closed and the centering could be removed