While many terms are used interchangeably, ‘recycling’, ‘spolia’, ‘reuse’, and ‘reprocessing’ have distinct definitions and histories. This introduction situates previous studies in the areas of ancient recycling and reuse and provides a summary of thirty-eight villa case study sites with archaeological evidence for material salvage and recycling.

Materials collection and organization was an essential part of recycling operations, as it allowed owners and workers to plan their operations and trade. This chapter offers a model for understanding organization and stockpiling and how it relates to recycling at villas and in other contexts.

Both the decline in supply of new materials and sustained recycling practices that were culturally embedded drove villa material salvage and recycling. Economic models emphasize the importance of extant trade routes, especially riverine routes, for the recycled materials markets.

Archaeological evidence of reprocessing installations (hearths, kilns, and other fire-powered operations) has been discovered at thirty-one villa case study sites, working lead, iron, bronze, gold, copper, glass, and converting limestone into quicklime. The spatial relationship between the installations and the rooms in the former villa indicates both that these workshops reprocessed salvaged architectural materials and utilized the footprint of the villa to undertake the operations.

Evidence of the removal of desired architectural components has been archaeologically detected at villa sites ranging in chronology from the second century CE to the medieval period. Alongside common patterns of material salvage from late antiquity, there was also evidence of ritual practices undertaken as part of demolition and recycling operations, providing a window into the cultural or religious beliefs of these workforces.

This concluding section emphasizes that in late antiquity, materials held monetary value that was higher than their use-value and this value was capitalized upon by landowners and groups of specialized professionals involved in recycling. Furthermore, villas were ideally positioned for the movement of materials within local networks, which ultimately preserved the manufactured value of architectural glass, metals, and stone.

The Roman description of value in architecture is positioned against other value propositions, including value in ruins, historical-value, use-value, and age-value, to arrive at a pyramidal value structure for Roman villa architecture. A summary of common villa building materials enables a greater understanding of cultural and monetary values of architectural materials.

In addition to the economic factors influencing recycling, the cultural context of villas, as properties of the now-Christian aristocracy, placed them ideally for supplying materials for new church construction.

Economic inequalities are increasingly prominent in public debates – from Thomas Piketty’s seminal Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) and the subsequent creation of the World Inequality Database (Wid.World n.d.), to civil society reports such as that of Oxfam (Oxfam International 2019). In addition, major social movements of the last decade, including Tunisia’s 2011 revolution (Srebernik 2014) and the rise to power of demagogic leaders such as Donald Trump (Shiller 2016), have been attributed, at least in part, to economic inequalities.