Vitruvius, writing centuries after the Doric temple's Archaic development, records a tradition that its stone forms preserved details, like the triglyph and the shape of certain moldings, originally carpentry solutions from an earlier generation of timber and mudbrick temples, translated into limestone and marble once Greek builders began working in permanent materials during the seventh century BCE. Whether or not every specific detail Vitruvius names reflects real lost wooden originals, the general pattern, monumental stone construction gradually replacing earlier perishable temple buildings across the Archaic period, is well supported by archaeology at sites including Olympia and the Argive Heraion.
The type spread with Greek colonization, so that some of the largest and best preserved Doric peripteral temples stand not in mainland Greece but in Sicily and southern Italy, at Paestum, Selinunte and Agrigento, built by colonists who carried the form with them. Because the same basic plan, a colonnaded rectangle housing a god's image, kept being rebuilt and refined for close to a thousand years, surviving examples span an enormous range of scale and date, from small local shrines to the largest of all completed Doric temples, the Olympieion planned for Zeus at Akragas in Sicily, and give modern visitors one of the clearest continuous architectural threads running through the whole of ancient Greek religious life.