1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:05,460 There is a lesson, maxim fortune is like glass. The bright, the glitter, the more easily broken. 2 00:00:05,460 --> 00:00:09,570 Leaving aside fortune for a moment, glass is very easily broken. 3 00:00:09,570 --> 00:00:17,130 So what did the Romans do with all that broken glass? Welcome to the massive Oxford School of Archaeology podcasts, Digging for Meaning. 4 00:00:17,130 --> 00:00:23,370 I'm Dr. Victoria Sainsbury and I'm here to answer two questions. Firstly, did the Romans recycle glass? 5 00:00:23,370 --> 00:00:31,050 And secondly, why do archaeologists care? So I'm going to cheat a little bit and give you the answer first, which I'll then explain. 6 00:00:31,050 --> 00:00:36,810 So, yes, the Romans did recycle glass, but how we know that and what it means is a little bit tricky. 7 00:00:36,810 --> 00:00:41,880 So we'll start with the second question. Why do archaeologists care about recycling? 8 00:00:41,880 --> 00:00:47,460 Archaeologists care about recycling? Because it changes the archaeological record or the policies. 9 00:00:47,460 --> 00:00:53,850 We can read it from the material culture of the societies that we study. Archaeologists, for the most part, study rubbish. 10 00:00:53,850 --> 00:00:57,870 We study what societies leave behind. However, something is recycled. 11 00:00:57,870 --> 00:01:03,210 It isn't left behind, or rather it's left behind or something different or rather. 12 00:01:03,210 --> 00:01:09,510 This means two things for the archaeological record. Firstly, that something that could have been there no longer is. 13 00:01:09,510 --> 00:01:17,340 And secondly, that something new is there. This means we might perceive an absence in one century of a certain material or object. 14 00:01:17,340 --> 00:01:21,030 In this case, glass and an abundance of it, 100 years later, 15 00:01:21,030 --> 00:01:26,610 when in reality the lives of the people using those objects, they'll have access to glass. 16 00:01:26,610 --> 00:01:33,470 It's just that it was the same glass being recycled over and over again. So it would seem that one hundred years they had lost 100 years. 17 00:01:33,470 --> 00:01:41,430 They didn't. Is wrong. Understanding, just like can tell us a lot also about these societies, about how they traded, 18 00:01:41,430 --> 00:01:46,800 how they organise their industry, how wealthy people wear what they earned, whether they earn things. 19 00:01:46,800 --> 00:01:53,280 All I'm saying recycling really helps us understand as well how people perceive materials, how they thought of them. 20 00:01:53,280 --> 00:02:02,220 If you reuse something because it belongs to your mother or your grandmother, that can be really important far more than its perceived material value. 21 00:02:02,220 --> 00:02:09,280 All of this reuse recycling can also offer us insights into our modern careers, what we do well and what we could do better. 22 00:02:09,280 --> 00:02:16,320 By a lot of standards, the Romans were very cosmopolitan people. They had a lot of stuff and therefore they created a lot of waste. 23 00:02:16,320 --> 00:02:21,270 The Roman Empire, at its height around the end of the first century A.D. was extensive. 24 00:02:21,270 --> 00:02:27,510 It went from Spain in the west to the Persian Gulf in the east, from Scotland in the north, right down to Sudan in the south. 25 00:02:27,510 --> 00:02:32,910 And this society was highly monetise. Most people could purchase goods from across this entire expanse. 26 00:02:32,910 --> 00:02:36,990 But obviously all this distance adds cost. Much the same way it does now. 27 00:02:36,990 --> 00:02:42,240 It can be very cheap to produce something in one area of the world and much cheaper than to produce it locally. 28 00:02:42,240 --> 00:02:48,300 But there is an added cost of bringing it to you. Sometimes that outweighs the cost of producing it locally and sometimes it doesn't. 29 00:02:48,300 --> 00:02:55,530 Well, presently, our recycling is often concerned with sustainability. The environmental cost of moving these things or producing something me. 30 00:02:55,530 --> 00:03:01,560 The recycling seems far more driven by the economic cost of this movement as well as access, 31 00:03:01,560 --> 00:03:05,610 whether or not they actually could move this material at various different points in time. 32 00:03:05,610 --> 00:03:11,010 These networks that criss cross the Roman Empire were more or less successful at trade. 33 00:03:11,010 --> 00:03:15,870 So across this large empire, they gradients for materials are obviously not always widespread. 34 00:03:15,870 --> 00:03:24,120 Roman glass requires primarily sand, and while sand is relatively widespread, the best quality sand is along the Syria, Palestine and Egyptian coasts. 35 00:03:24,120 --> 00:03:28,920 And it's here where the Romans produced their gas on a massive scale. Then they break it down into small pieces. 36 00:03:28,920 --> 00:03:33,570 And that was shipped around the empire to be made into jars, glasses, bottles, bowls, jewellery, 37 00:03:33,570 --> 00:03:42,180 much more excavations of these large glass factories in Israel showing the size of some of these batches around nine tons at a time, 38 00:03:42,180 --> 00:03:47,190 which is about one and a half African elephants. This coastline's supply, the entire empire. 39 00:03:47,190 --> 00:03:53,970 But this first production of glass is very labour intensive. A very high heat is required to turn sand into gloss. 40 00:03:53,970 --> 00:03:58,800 But then the heat required to make that glass liquid enough again to blow is much less. 41 00:03:58,800 --> 00:04:03,120 This means that there are two elements that make glass recycling attractive in the Roman world. 42 00:04:03,120 --> 00:04:10,440 Firstly, it removes the transport costs from, again, moving material from the Syria Palestine coast to elsewhere in the Empire, 43 00:04:10,440 --> 00:04:15,660 but also reduce the fuel cost of this high temperature production. 44 00:04:15,660 --> 00:04:22,320 To put these into a concrete material example is made in Israel and then shipped to London where it's made into a jar. 45 00:04:22,320 --> 00:04:27,420 You buy this job, you use this jar, and then because it's glass, you break this jar. 46 00:04:27,420 --> 00:04:33,330 You need a new jar. Obviously, you can buy a jar that's produced in exactly the same way as the first. 47 00:04:33,330 --> 00:04:39,290 But you could also buy a different sort of brand new jar jar that was made of pieces of many broken jars. 48 00:04:39,290 --> 00:04:45,180 This breaking glass is usually cold, call it. And the advantage of it is, again, it's already in the right province. 49 00:04:45,180 --> 00:04:48,390 The energy has already been expended to turn the sand into glass. 50 00:04:48,390 --> 00:04:53,160 So to make a new jar requires earning a much smaller part of this long production process. 51 00:04:53,160 --> 00:04:59,190 And visually, it's usually impossible to tell whether or not a jar is being made of recycled material or whether it hasn't. 52 00:04:59,190 --> 00:05:06,330 In the same way that if I took you into a supermarket now, I'm not sure you could tell me which wine bottles were made of fresh or recycled glass. 53 00:05:06,330 --> 00:05:11,970 Once in use, glass often broke, but it could be reheated and remade over and over again. 54 00:05:11,970 --> 00:05:15,450 We have some archaeological evidence of this sort of production from recycling. 55 00:05:15,450 --> 00:05:18,990 A small workshop was found under buildings, a blazing whole street in London. 56 00:05:18,990 --> 00:05:21,360 And they show production from broken glass. 57 00:05:21,360 --> 00:05:29,370 In literary examples, Latin satirists use a trope about people buying up broken glass in the same way someone now might say big issue seller. 58 00:05:29,370 --> 00:05:35,340 The problem is understanding how much recycling was going on. How important was it to remove glass production? 59 00:05:35,340 --> 00:05:41,020 We can get an answer to this by using scientific approaches. We can understand how recycled materials. 60 00:05:41,020 --> 00:05:45,300 In fact, what we come to learn is that in some cases the Romans seem to be recycling that glass at a 61 00:05:45,300 --> 00:05:50,400 far higher rate than most present industrialised countries using these chemical approaches. 62 00:05:50,400 --> 00:05:54,810 We look at patterns of recycling, which tell us about the practises performed by people, 63 00:05:54,810 --> 00:06:02,370 what they did with their material, which led to this chemical signature. I'm going to talk about two sets of contrasting glass patterns. 64 00:06:02,370 --> 00:06:06,500 One scene during the Roman period and one scene during the early mediaeval period in Britain. 65 00:06:06,500 --> 00:06:09,840 And I going to talk about what that tells us about glass industry at the time. 66 00:06:09,840 --> 00:06:13,350 This is drawn from my project, from trash to treasure at the University of Oxford. 67 00:06:13,350 --> 00:06:17,940 This project cutted published data on chemical composition, the first Millennium Cross across Britain, 68 00:06:17,940 --> 00:06:21,840 as well as analysing new samples from sites in Kent and Oxfordshire. 69 00:06:21,840 --> 00:06:27,930 This lab made to look at how glass reach Roman Britain and how it was traded around and recycled. 70 00:06:27,930 --> 00:06:32,730 The first set of patents I'm going to talk about are already obvious as patents because of each other. 71 00:06:32,730 --> 00:06:35,660 This is what happens in the first to third century in Britain. 72 00:06:35,660 --> 00:06:40,710 Size in Britain usually fall into one of three categories military, civilian or religious. 73 00:06:40,710 --> 00:06:47,230 And while we don't have a lot of information about glass on religious size, we do have quite a law about military and civilian sites. 74 00:06:47,230 --> 00:06:52,710 I should take a moment here to point out the designation of a Roman site as military or civilian is a little fuzzy. 75 00:06:52,710 --> 00:06:57,570 It used to be thought there was a very clear line here that a site was either a military site or a civilian site. 76 00:06:57,570 --> 00:07:03,840 But civilians lived and traded on military sites and military personnel were deeply involved in cities across room in Britain. 77 00:07:03,840 --> 00:07:10,680 In fact, a great deal of Roman cities started out as military sites or military sites were placed on existing settlements. 78 00:07:10,680 --> 00:07:16,860 However, when we look at the glass found in several large Roman forts, those with perhaps the smallest amount of civilian settlement. 79 00:07:16,860 --> 00:07:21,000 There is a clear difference in the chemistry of this glass to that found in nearby settlements. 80 00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:26,190 Looking closely, it seems that the Roman army recycle the material separately from the civilian material in a 81 00:07:26,190 --> 00:07:31,260 highly organised system where it seems that glass was heavily sorted and carefully recycled. 82 00:07:31,260 --> 00:07:35,040 Well, we have very little evidence of glass production on Roman military sites in Britain. 83 00:07:35,040 --> 00:07:37,380 We do know that they produce a lot of metalwork on these sides. 84 00:07:37,380 --> 00:07:42,360 And again, evidence of recycling from the metal seems to show the same separation from military sites, 85 00:07:42,360 --> 00:07:44,880 from what might be considered the mainstream market. 86 00:07:44,880 --> 00:07:52,140 These chemical signatures, along with the parallel metalwork, seem to imply that a lot of glass working is going on on these military sites. 87 00:07:52,140 --> 00:07:56,550 We just don't have the evidence for it. This is a general problem with glass working. 88 00:07:56,550 --> 00:08:03,360 The evidence from other high-temperature technologies, such as metalworking, is often quite hard to distinguish. 89 00:08:03,360 --> 00:08:08,850 Turning to civilian sides, the glass is moving very differently, but across a network that is incredibly vast. 90 00:08:08,850 --> 00:08:15,390 This less controlled system of recycling seems to show glass moving in and out of it, sort of central messy system. 91 00:08:15,390 --> 00:08:20,880 Small farms in Wiltshire were part of the same recycling network that stretched to Calyon Glass from all around the country, 92 00:08:20,880 --> 00:08:28,530 contributing and taking from a big melting pot of material. This material also continued to be recycled centuries on end. 93 00:08:28,530 --> 00:08:35,550 It's only by seeing these two systems together, the civilian and military material that they stand out as distinct as two different systems. 94 00:08:35,550 --> 00:08:39,540 Individually, it's quite difficult to pull apart a story of recycling. 95 00:08:39,540 --> 00:08:44,340 Another example using this sort of contrast to give us information is in the late 96 00:08:44,340 --> 00:08:48,720 Roman early mediaeval period in Britain in the fifth to six centuries in Britain. 97 00:08:48,720 --> 00:08:55,620 Roman influence was fairly steadily withdrawn. While this is a fairly complex process which does as podcasts of its own, 98 00:08:55,620 --> 00:09:00,330 essentially some sites show a continuation of life in a fairly Roman fashion. 99 00:09:00,330 --> 00:09:04,260 Other sites show more of a return to previous Iron Age practises. 100 00:09:04,260 --> 00:09:10,050 And finally, some places show a completely new set of paintings with the migration of Anglo-Saxon peoples across Britain. 101 00:09:10,050 --> 00:09:15,260 Interestingly, comparing very early Anglo-Saxon site in Kent Le Minge and a site which. 102 00:09:15,260 --> 00:09:21,800 Evidence of both night Roman and Anglo-Saxon, potentially contemporaneous occupation, Dorchester on Thames in Oxfordshire. 103 00:09:21,800 --> 00:09:26,000 Different forms of glass recycling is also seen in this period. 104 00:09:26,000 --> 00:09:32,510 Very little fresh glass seems to be reaching Britain. So both the Menge and Dorchester show a large proportion of recycling. 105 00:09:32,510 --> 00:09:35,900 However, there's a clear difference in what they're recycling. 106 00:09:35,900 --> 00:09:40,580 In the fifth sixth century, Dorchester is a recycling fourth and early fifth century glass. 107 00:09:40,580 --> 00:09:48,730 However, lumens is recycling glass from the first to third centuries. That is, Dorchester seems to be recycling relatively contemporaneous glass, 108 00:09:48,730 --> 00:09:52,730 whereas the Menges recycling glass that is already three hundred years out of date. 109 00:09:52,730 --> 00:09:58,940 This implies that while Dorchester is continuing to exploit this mixing pot of material that is being common across the Roman period, 110 00:09:58,940 --> 00:10:03,830 people at LA Menger instead likely scavenging long abandoned Roman sites for material. 111 00:10:03,830 --> 00:10:11,540 It's worth noting that the best produce elements are often very fine, walled, thin, beautiful pieces of high quality glass work, 112 00:10:11,540 --> 00:10:17,360 whereas material Dorchester seems relatively abundant, decorative, but a little bit more utilitarian. 113 00:10:17,360 --> 00:10:23,930 They're heavy glasses with thicker walls, which, while it requires less skill to produce, used up a lot more glass, 114 00:10:23,930 --> 00:10:32,150 which might imply that Dorchester just had a lot more glass around, whereas the Minch is making only high status material, high status people. 115 00:10:32,150 --> 00:10:36,590 While Bright, these sites rely heavily on recycling the practise of this recycling and what it means, 116 00:10:36,590 --> 00:10:39,890 how these people use and understood this glass is very different. 117 00:10:39,890 --> 00:10:45,200 Again, it's only by comparing these really large datasets that we begin to see these patterns. 118 00:10:45,200 --> 00:10:53,060 So what can we take away from all this? Well, certainly that the Romans recycle their glass and especially here in Britain at the edge of the empire. 119 00:10:53,060 --> 00:10:57,620 This can tell us a lot about how people use made and thought about glass river recycling 120 00:10:57,620 --> 00:11:02,420 doesn't really seem to be driven by the same ecological concerns as our present recycling. 121 00:11:02,420 --> 00:11:05,480 But they're concerned with problems of access and affordability. 122 00:11:05,480 --> 00:11:09,170 The reason why archaeologists care about this recycling is because it clearly can teach us so 123 00:11:09,170 --> 00:11:12,950 much about these people and how they run their industries and how they thought about them. 124 00:11:12,950 --> 00:11:20,630 Terrill's, but also because it so fundamentally alters the record that they leave behind making assumptions based on an absence. 125 00:11:20,630 --> 00:11:28,580 What we don't understand, whether or not it's material that could be mutated into something else could leave us making very incorrect assumptions. 126 00:11:28,580 --> 00:11:33,380 The German author, Petronius East Broken Glass as a metaphor for worthless junk. 127 00:11:33,380 --> 00:11:37,760 But it's clear that breaking glass was anything but worthless to the Romans. 128 00:11:37,760 --> 00:11:42,350 Thanks for joining me, Dr Victoria Sainsbury, for a discussion about Roman glass recycling. 129 00:11:42,350 --> 00:11:47,750 If you'd like to read anything more about this, or we'd like to listen to any of our other episodes of Digging for Meaning, 130 00:11:47,750 --> 00:11:55,813 please cheque us out on the University of Oxford School of Archaeology website.