The Organized Recycling of Roman Villa Sites

Recycling and reusing architectural glass, metal, and stone at villas was a circumstantially specific productive activity. The circumstances are an increasingly recognized archaeological phase in both the rural and the urban settings: when buildings were abandoned or left uninhabited from the third century AD onwards, desired building materials were removed, and in many cases reprocessed directly on site. The on-site nature of villa recycling has seemed unusual, especially because of the establishment of workshops in formerly residential rooms. The initial supposition in early twenty-first-century scholarship on the ‘end of the villa’ was that the workshops were installed by squatters at abandoned sites, but the work presented here challenges this. This chapter takes a broad view of villa recycling and reuse, considering three factors (chronology, setting, and afterlife) to explore the economic motivations for on-site villa recycling, and discussing the logistics that made it an economically viable activity.

A Regional Economy of Recycling over Four Centuries at Spolverino (Tuscany) and Environs

The Roman settlement at Spolverino (Grosseto, Tuscany) was a centre of recycling and reuse. Excavation has revealed a long sequence of occupation, from the late first to the late fifth century AD. Part of a larger assemblage of Roman sites in this part of the coastal ager Rusellanus, it may initially have been a farm or medium-scale villa, but was repurposed for manufacturing activities in the late Antonine period; archaeological research undertaken from 2010–13 has demonstrated the remains of a series of workshops for creating metal ingots, objects from secondary bone reuse, and organizing glass cullet for melting. It is suggested that, as the importance of the agrarian economy of this part of the region waned, Spolverino served the regional and wider economy of the western Tyrrhenian coast by creating a central hub for recycling and reuse, revealing an economic investment and social involvement in recycling across four centuries.

Elements, Isotopes, and Glass Recycling

This chapter is partly based upon the results of the ARCHGLASS project, which analysed samples dating from the middle of the first millennium BC to the ninth century AD. With the introduction of Greco-Roman translucent glass, colour separation and control over the properties of a re-molten batch become much easier. Once the benefits of glass recycling in terms of raw material procurement, energy expenditure, and waste management are clear, the collection and reuse of cullet becomes common in the Roman world. It is estimated here that upwards from a quarter of the glass circulating in the Roman to early Byzantine economy at any time constitutes recycled glass. It is hypothesized that, apart from the possible addition of cullet to tank furnaces, glass recycling would have been a small-scale process, at the level of the individual workshop.

Recycling and Roman Silver Coinage

One of the great advantages of non-ferrous metals over most other materials, with the exception of glass, is the fact that artefacts that are broken or otherwise no longer of use can be melted down and remade into something else. For Roman coinage, this characteristic would have been particularly useful, enabling frequent changes of both emperor and coin type without the need for large amounts of freshly mined metal and incurring the associated costs of smelting. Furthermore, it also means that objects already made of metals of the correct composition can be converted into coin relatively easily. Evidence of both trace elements and lead isotopes is reported, presenting a complex picture of mixing, recycling, refining, and episodic use of stored resources that are occasionally supported by references in historical documents and stylistic features of the coins themselves.

When the Statue is both Marble and Lime

Although many of the chapters in this volume focus on a single class of object or material, it is clear that recycling and reuse activities frequently occur together, regardless of the material in question, or its provenance. The picture we can currently offer of Roman recycling and reuse is necessarily partial, but it is also profoundly important for wider understanding of Roman society, technology, and culture. Recycling and reuse are embedded in the social and cultural as well as the economic, and may be constrained or enabled by technology. In this concluding chapter, we sketch out some of the most prominent parts of this emerging picture, from the chaîne opératoire, to scales and methods of analysis, labour, organization, knowledge and skills, and value, and make recommendations for future work in this promising and rich field of inquiry.

Reuse of Roman Artefacts in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval West

In Late Antiquity, reuse and recycling has mainly been considered in relation to spolia and to precious metal artefacts such as silver plate and coins. Yet there is much evidence for reuse behaviour across a wide range of artefact types in more everyday materials. Some of this is connected to ordinary habits of reuse and recycling found throughout the Roman and late antique periods, although it is in part also a response to prevailing economic and social conditions. Since these may vary from one place to another or across different social groups, interpretations must take account of the particular contexts within which objects were used. This chapter addresses reuse behaviour from the late antique and early medieval periods in the West, with a case study drawn from the author’s detailed studies of particular non-ferrous metal objects from Britain, including objects newly produced in the fifth century.

Old Buildings, Building Material, and the Death of Recycling in Post-Roman Britain

This chapter sketches out two long-standing and ubiquitous material practices in Roman Britain: the reuse and refurbishment of old masonry buildings, walls, and foundations; and the repurposing of stone, brick, and tile. Both the reuse of buildings and building material, so I argue, were standard practices in Britain from the second century on, but both disappeared within a few generations of the Roman state’s withdrawal from Britain. So it is the process of the decline and fall of these practices and the reasons that stand behind their ending that are the focus of my chapter. Its emphasis reflects the fact that although I am very interested in ancient recycling practices, as an early medieval historian, I am more engaged by the story of their demise. This chapter is more focused upon the demise of such practices.

Seeking the Invisible

In this chapter, the results of a large-scale programme of glass chemical data collation and analysis are presented to argue that glass recycling in the Roman period was far more extensive than has been realized to date. Over 6,000 samples of glass from published analyses since 1999 are interrogated in order to produce a long-term and large-scale data set for recycling evidence. In addition, literary evidence, and data from shipwrecks and other archaeological sites are summarized and considered, and basic modelling is used to suggest the sorts of patterns we should be looking for in compositional data for glass. It is argued that the quantity of Roman glass that was recycled has been underestimated due to several factors, including a lack of consideration of ‘like with like’ mixing, a lack of consideration of the formation processes of the archaeological record, and analytical sampling bias towards colourless vessel glass.

An Inconvenient Truth

Amphora reuse is an inconvenient truth: the topic has received little attention in Roman studies, even though it certainly happened, and potentially on a huge scale. What was the effect of amphora reuse in the past? What data and methods can archaeologists use to evaluate it? How does the phenomenon affect our ability to interpret Roman amphora distributions as proxy evidence for the distribution of foodstuffs? In this chapter we summarize the theories and evidence used in the study of amphora reuse to identify the significant challenges involved in tackling this inconvenient truth. We argue for the need to do this through computational simulation modelling combined with residue analysis. As a proof-of-concept, we illustrate our approach through a simple abstract model simulating selected theories of amphora reuse: the differential effects on amphora distribution patterns of different probabilities of reuse at prime-use locales, and of reuse selection probabilities at port sites.

Reuse and Recycling of Papyrus

The reuse of writing material manufactured from papyrus is widely attested. This chapter presents some illustrative examples of how the blank sides of previously written-upon texts have been used, mostly from the time of Augustus until the fourth century AD. Discarded documents and sometimes literary manuscripts were recycled as raw material for a kind of papier-mâché referred to as cartonnage. I discuss this term, suggesting that recycled papyri from book covers should not be called cartonnage papyri, but rather papyri from book covers. The reuse of writing material for later texts, and the recycling of papyri into cartonnage and book covers have been used as evidence both pro and contra the argument that papyrus was expensive. The apparently contradictory evidence for the value of papyrus can be explained by the fact that, while papyrus as a writing material was cheap, once written upon, manuscripts (especially of literary compositions) became costly.