There is a lesson, maxim fortune is like glass. The bright, the glitter, the more easily broken.
Leaving aside fortune for a moment, glass is very easily broken.
So what did the Romans do with all that broken glass? Welcome to the massive Oxford School of Archaeology podcasts, Digging for Meaning.
I'm Dr. Victoria Sainsbury and I'm here to answer two questions. Firstly, did the Romans recycle glass?
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.
So, yes, the Romans did recycle glass, but how we know that and what it means is a little bit tricky.
So we'll start with the second question. Why do archaeologists care about recycling?
Archaeologists care about recycling? Because it changes the archaeological record or the policies.
We can read it from the material culture of the societies that we study. Archaeologists, for the most part, study rubbish.
We study what societies leave behind. However, something is recycled.
It isn't left behind, or rather it's left behind or something different or rather.
This means two things for the archaeological record. Firstly, that something that could have been there no longer is.
And secondly, that something new is there. This means we might perceive an absence in one century of a certain material or object.
In this case, glass and an abundance of it, 100 years later,
when in reality the lives of the people using those objects, they'll have access to glass.
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.
They didn't. Is wrong. Understanding, just like can tell us a lot also about these societies, about how they traded,
how they organise their industry, how wealthy people wear what they earned, whether they earn things.
All I'm saying recycling really helps us understand as well how people perceive materials, how they thought of them.
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.
All of this reuse recycling can also offer us insights into our modern careers, what we do well and what we could do better.
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.
The Roman Empire, at its height around the end of the first century A.D. was extensive.
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.
And this society was highly monetise. Most people could purchase goods from across this entire expanse.
But obviously all this distance adds cost. Much the same way it does now.
It can be very cheap to produce something in one area of the world and much cheaper than to produce it locally.
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.
Well, presently, our recycling is often concerned with sustainability. The environmental cost of moving these things or producing something me.
The recycling seems far more driven by the economic cost of this movement as well as access,
whether or not they actually could move this material at various different points in time.
These networks that criss cross the Roman Empire were more or less successful at trade.
So across this large empire, they gradients for materials are obviously not always widespread.
Roman glass requires primarily sand, and while sand is relatively widespread, the best quality sand is along the Syria, Palestine and Egyptian coasts.
And it's here where the Romans produced their gas on a massive scale. Then they break it down into small pieces.
And that was shipped around the empire to be made into jars, glasses, bottles, bowls, jewellery,
much more excavations of these large glass factories in Israel showing the size of some of these batches around nine tons at a time,
which is about one and a half African elephants. This coastline's supply, the entire empire.
But this first production of glass is very labour intensive. A very high heat is required to turn sand into gloss.
But then the heat required to make that glass liquid enough again to blow is much less.
This means that there are two elements that make glass recycling attractive in the Roman world.
Firstly, it removes the transport costs from, again, moving material from the Syria Palestine coast to elsewhere in the Empire,
but also reduce the fuel cost of this high temperature production.
To put these into a concrete material example is made in Israel and then shipped to London where it's made into a jar.
You buy this job, you use this jar, and then because it's glass, you break this jar.
You need a new jar. Obviously, you can buy a jar that's produced in exactly the same way as the first.
But you could also buy a different sort of brand new jar jar that was made of pieces of many broken jars.
This breaking glass is usually cold, call it. And the advantage of it is, again, it's already in the right province.
The energy has already been expended to turn the sand into glass.
So to make a new jar requires earning a much smaller part of this long production process.
And visually, it's usually impossible to tell whether or not a jar is being made of recycled material or whether it hasn't.
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.
Once in use, glass often broke, but it could be reheated and remade over and over again.
We have some archaeological evidence of this sort of production from recycling.
A small workshop was found under buildings, a blazing whole street in London.
And they show production from broken glass.
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.
The problem is understanding how much recycling was going on. How important was it to remove glass production?
We can get an answer to this by using scientific approaches. We can understand how recycled materials.
In fact, what we come to learn is that in some cases the Romans seem to be recycling that glass at a
far higher rate than most present industrialised countries using these chemical approaches.
We look at patterns of recycling, which tell us about the practises performed by people,
what they did with their material, which led to this chemical signature. I'm going to talk about two sets of contrasting glass patterns.
One scene during the Roman period and one scene during the early mediaeval period in Britain.
And I going to talk about what that tells us about glass industry at the time.
This is drawn from my project, from trash to treasure at the University of Oxford.
This project cutted published data on chemical composition, the first Millennium Cross across Britain,
as well as analysing new samples from sites in Kent and Oxfordshire.
This lab made to look at how glass reach Roman Britain and how it was traded around and recycled.
The first set of patents I'm going to talk about are already obvious as patents because of each other.
This is what happens in the first to third century in Britain.
Size in Britain usually fall into one of three categories military, civilian or religious.
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.
I should take a moment here to point out the designation of a Roman site as military or civilian is a little fuzzy.
It used to be thought there was a very clear line here that a site was either a military site or a civilian site.
But civilians lived and traded on military sites and military personnel were deeply involved in cities across room in Britain.
In fact, a great deal of Roman cities started out as military sites or military sites were placed on existing settlements.
However, when we look at the glass found in several large Roman forts, those with perhaps the smallest amount of civilian settlement.
There is a clear difference in the chemistry of this glass to that found in nearby settlements.
Looking closely, it seems that the Roman army recycle the material separately from the civilian material in a
highly organised system where it seems that glass was heavily sorted and carefully recycled.
Well, we have very little evidence of glass production on Roman military sites in Britain.
We do know that they produce a lot of metalwork on these sides.
And again, evidence of recycling from the metal seems to show the same separation from military sites,
from what might be considered the mainstream market.
These chemical signatures, along with the parallel metalwork, seem to imply that a lot of glass working is going on on these military sites.
We just don't have the evidence for it. This is a general problem with glass working.
The evidence from other high-temperature technologies, such as metalworking, is often quite hard to distinguish.
Turning to civilian sides, the glass is moving very differently, but across a network that is incredibly vast.
This less controlled system of recycling seems to show glass moving in and out of it, sort of central messy system.
Small farms in Wiltshire were part of the same recycling network that stretched to Calyon Glass from all around the country,
contributing and taking from a big melting pot of material. This material also continued to be recycled centuries on end.
It's only by seeing these two systems together, the civilian and military material that they stand out as distinct as two different systems.
Individually, it's quite difficult to pull apart a story of recycling.
Another example using this sort of contrast to give us information is in the late
Roman early mediaeval period in Britain in the fifth to six centuries in Britain.
Roman influence was fairly steadily withdrawn. While this is a fairly complex process which does as podcasts of its own,
essentially some sites show a continuation of life in a fairly Roman fashion.
Other sites show more of a return to previous Iron Age practises.
And finally, some places show a completely new set of paintings with the migration of Anglo-Saxon peoples across Britain.
Interestingly, comparing very early Anglo-Saxon site in Kent Le Minge and a site which.
Evidence of both night Roman and Anglo-Saxon, potentially contemporaneous occupation, Dorchester on Thames in Oxfordshire.
Different forms of glass recycling is also seen in this period.
Very little fresh glass seems to be reaching Britain. So both the Menge and Dorchester show a large proportion of recycling.
However, there's a clear difference in what they're recycling.
In the fifth sixth century, Dorchester is a recycling fourth and early fifth century glass.
However, lumens is recycling glass from the first to third centuries. That is, Dorchester seems to be recycling relatively contemporaneous glass,
whereas the Menges recycling glass that is already three hundred years out of date.
This implies that while Dorchester is continuing to exploit this mixing pot of material that is being common across the Roman period,
people at LA Menger instead likely scavenging long abandoned Roman sites for material.
It's worth noting that the best produce elements are often very fine, walled, thin, beautiful pieces of high quality glass work,
whereas material Dorchester seems relatively abundant, decorative, but a little bit more utilitarian.
They're heavy glasses with thicker walls, which, while it requires less skill to produce, used up a lot more glass,
which might imply that Dorchester just had a lot more glass around, whereas the Minch is making only high status material, high status people.
While Bright, these sites rely heavily on recycling the practise of this recycling and what it means,
how these people use and understood this glass is very different.
Again, it's only by comparing these really large datasets that we begin to see these patterns.
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.
This can tell us a lot about how people use made and thought about glass river recycling
doesn't really seem to be driven by the same ecological concerns as our present recycling.
But they're concerned with problems of access and affordability.
The reason why archaeologists care about this recycling is because it clearly can teach us so
much about these people and how they run their industries and how they thought about them.
Terrill's, but also because it so fundamentally alters the record that they leave behind making assumptions based on an absence.
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.
The German author, Petronius East Broken Glass as a metaphor for worthless junk.
But it's clear that breaking glass was anything but worthless to the Romans.
Thanks for joining me, Dr Victoria Sainsbury, for a discussion about Roman glass recycling.
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,
please cheque us out on the University of Oxford School of Archaeology website.