She was one of the first people who studied the application of stones in cultural heritage as a legacy of physical artefacts, and intangible attributes inherited from past generations.

During her teen years, her family had moved to Rome for her father's work and required a long stay in the city due to her mother becoming ill.

[4] However, upon finding out that only few archaeologists could give her accurate information to help identify different kinds of marbles, she decided to tackle this issue herself.

Teaching herself, Porter developed a rudimentary understanding of the basic of geology and continued to research the various Roman architecture and stones until her family moved back to England.

Despite not attending school, a young Mary Porter became self-taught in the field of geology to gain a better understanding of the decorative stones that had once caught her eye.

[6] Porter now had the geological knowledge to organize the classes of decorative stones that at one point had only the mere colour or texture attributed to them as their names.

[7] The self-taught geologist continued to study decorative stones and their importance and function in Roman architecture, leading up to her many publications on the subject, under the guidance of Henry Miers.

As a result of the success of her book What Rome was Built With: A Description of the Stones Employed in Ancient Times for its Building and Decoration and labor at Oxford University Porter began to receive offers from other museums abroad to classify and catalogue their collections of minerals and marbles.

[10] It started with Porter helping Thomas Barker, a lecturer in crystallography at Oxford University, with finishing the index with aid from Reginald Spiller as well.

She was involved in publishing a number of research articles concerning X-Ray crystallography in journals such as Mineralogical Magazine, American Mineralogist, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Nature and Acta Crystallographica and continued to make contributions to the Corsi Collection at Oxford.

[2] After being tasked with translating the Corsi Collection Porter's expertise in her field grew, and she was able to publish her book, What Rome was Built With: A Description of the Stones Employed in Ancient Times for its Building and Decoration (1907), which is still relevant in today's geological studies.

[11] Specifically, critics accentuate that there isn't an authority for Bruzza's assertion on which Porter bases her statement, that the columns of the original basilica were of marble at all.

[12] Henry Frowd notes that Carrara marble industry is one of the most interesting sections written by Porter and that the book itself describes not only the stones of Rome, but the ancient quarries from which they came.

Although her work on publications such as The Barker Index did not provide to be very useful as better methods of crystal analysis were created soon after, Porter’s contributions to science and geology in a male dominated field helped pave the way for future female x-ray crystallographers.