The impluvium (pl. impluvia) is a water-catchment pool system meant to capture rain-water flowing from the compluvium, or slanted roof. Often placed "inside", instead of "outside", a building, it is a notable feature in many architectural traditions. Greco-Roman impluvium In Greco-Roman architectural studies, the impluvium refers to the sunken part of the atrium in a Greek or Roman house (domus), designed to carry away the rainwater falling from the compluvium of the roof. It is usually made of marble and placed about 30 cm below the floor of the atrium, and emptied into a subfloor cistern. Construction and use Inspection (without excavation) of impluvia in Paestum, Pompeii and Rome indicated that the pavement surface in the impluvia was porous, or that the non-porous stone tiles were separated by gaps significant enough to allow a substantial quantity of water caught in the basin of the impluvium to filter through the cracks and, beyond, through layers of gravel and sand into a holding chamber below ground. A circular stone opening protected with a puteal allows easy access by bucket and rope to this private, filtered and naturally cooled water supply. Similar water supplies were found elsewhere in the public spaces of the city, with their stone puteals showing the wear patterns of much use. In wet seasons, excess water that could not pass through the filter would overflow the basin and exit the building, and any sediment or debris remaining in the surface basin could be swept away. In hot weather, water could be drawn from the cistern chamber (or fetched by slaves from supplies outside the domus) and cast into the shallow pool to evaporate and provide a cooling effect to the entire atrium: as the water evaporated, air drawn in through the compluvium was cooled and moved throughout the house to cool the surrounding living spaces, a form of passive cooling. The combination of compluvium and impluvium formed an ingenious, effective and attractive manner of collecting, filtering and cooling rainwater. West and Central African impluvium Denyer, African Traditional Architecture, defined an impluvial style of architecture in West Africa, wherein "four buildings usually faced one another across [a] courtyard". Buildings of the "style" (really, a "clade-based" type), did not necessarily feature an impluvium to capture rain. Further complicating matters, some texts have conflated Denyer's impluvial style with impluvium itself, and thereby take impluvium to refer not to the use of mechanisms