Recycling the Roman Villa

Last week, I read Beth Munro’s new book, Recycling the Roman Villa: Material Salvage and the Medieval Circular Economy (2024). It is an interesting take on the afterlife of the Roman villa primarily in the west.

I read this book to support my growing interest in the afterlife of large scale architecture in the Late Roman world. In particular, I’m curious about how the long afterlife of the Roman bath at Isthmia fits into larger patterns of reuse and recycling in Late Antiquity. Munro looks at a number of Roman villas in the west where there is evidence for recycling. The evidence is scattered and at times sparse, but there are indeed signs of systematic salvage at Roman villa sites. These activities extended beyond the well-known processes of spoliation where prestige materials such as marble architectural elements or sculpture were removed for reuse elsewhere.

Munro stresses the recycling of a more mundane kind. She explores the evidence for the melting down and reuse of glass and metal and the presence of lime kilns. She likewise points out that the evidence for workshops inside of villas was not evidence for some generic “ruralization” of what was already an ex-urban villa site, but rather for its systematic reuse.  

Munro’s book fits into my developing interest in three ways:

1. Ruin versus Rubble. I had to admit that I sometimes found the difference between ruins and rubble a bit slippery. Munro’s book does not deal with this explicitly, but her approach to the reuse of Roman villas demonstrates how a ruin — an abandoned site — can undergo revaluation from a building (with whatever functional, symbolic, or aesthetic character) to an assemblage of recyclable materials. Rubble in contrast has become valueless. Its value, moreover, is unrecoverable in ordinary circumstances. At best, it is pushed aside or removed; at worst, it represents waste.

My recent efforts to understand the afterlife of the Roman bath at Isthmia has involved me thinking about not only the bath, but the entire site of Isthmia as a kind of ruin that eventually becomes rubble as it falls out of any system of productive reuse. 

2. Location and Reuse. Munro makes clear that the recycling of villas need not be limited to local needs and markets. By showing that the level of recycling at some villas exceeds plausible local requirements, Munro suggests that villa recycling contributed to a larger market for materials such as glass and metal which would move along established trade routes.

In light of this, one wonders whether the location of the Roman bath along the busy and well-connected Isthmia corridor contributed to its continued occupation, even long after the Hexamilion wall was built (and abandoned). Are some features at Isthmia consistent with the continued extraction of material from the site and at a scale beyond that of local consumption? In many ways, it is unclear as evidence for recycling at Isthmia, beyond the reuse of some of the bath’s walls in the Hexamilion and the presence of a lime kiln in the area, is limited, but it might help us understand the persistence of occupation at the bath many centuries after it fell out of its primary use.

3. Details. Munro’s book — inter alia — offers some incredibly compelling little details. For example, she reminded me to Tamara Lewitt’s under appreciated article “Bones in the Bathhouse: Re-evaluating the Notion of ’Squatters Occupation’ in 5th to 7th century Villas.” Lewitt argues that the term “squatters” implies low-status individuals and contends that this overlooks the continue presence of higher status, wealthy residents in the countryside of the West. The individuals buried in the ruins of Roman villas may represent this high status rural elite whose use of perishable material in their daily lives made them otherwise more obscure than their Roman predecessors.

Munro also makes the interesting observation that “squatters” (or whatever we should call the later occupants of villas) sometimes created level surfaces atop collapse of Roman villas in the west. Is this the moment that the ruin as a productive expression of the past become rubble to be pushed aside?