Mending as making: understanding recycling in a post-Roman context

While recycling was an important part of industry during the Roman Period, after the imaginary line of AD 410 any sort of reuse is too easily seen as merely scavenging and evidence of a failing society. While an increasing body of work highlights that an instant ‘fall’ of Roman Britain is simply incorrect, similarly recycling must be considered in a more nuanced way. It is not just a single practice but many practices of reuse, repair and remelting, driven by a multitude of factors: social, economic and political Recycling can be a last ditch effort to eek out the last of a dying material, an empowering process that frees artisans from the control of those with access to the raw materials, or a way to honor or connect with past owners. Due to its innate mutability but limited potential geological origins, glass is the perfect material for such discussions. Particularly in terms of artifacts that have been remelted, identifying and understanding recycling can be particularly problematic. In this preliminary survey, an archaeometric approach has been taken. Previous chemical analyses of British glasses are considered for likely markers of recycling. These are then considered as proportions of an assemblage that are ‘likely recycled’ material from Roman period, compared to early Medieval ones. The eventual aim of this work is to address the question of whether the source of medieval glass was ‘a gradually diminishing and degrading reservoir of cullet, ultimately derived from the prodigious industries of the 1st to 4th centuries’