This volume is one of seventeen produced by the Oxford Roman Economy Project since 2009 – a remarkable achievement, initiated by Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson. While others range from broad studies (trade, land ownership) to specific topics (the pepper trade, the fulling industry), this one is devoted to material evidence, including textiles, papyrus, stone, metal, glass, ceramics and building materials. Duckworth and Wilson have edited this substantial volume with remarkable speed. It was preceded by a conference in 2017, inspired by the problem that ‘… to date, recycling and reuse have both been under-represented in our models of the Roman economy, which may need to be adapted to account for them’ (p. 2). I myself was certainly guilty of this omission when discussing consumption and consumerism (J. Roman Archaeology 2008). Chapter 2 (by Peña) sets the scene with its subtitle ‘concepts, questions, materials, and organization’. Thanks to his meticulous discussion of different categories of materials and types of recycling, and precise definitions of terms, future studies will have a vocabulary with which to explore Roman recycling and reuse.

The comprehensive index allows readers to find general references to Britain, and to locate specific sites such as Vindolanda (important in Wild's fascinating chapter on textiles). Three chapters specifically concern Romano-British subjects – copper alloy (Bray), building materials (Fleming) and bracelets and belt fittings (Swift). Bray's chapter is a model of how theory, scientific analysis and behavioural interpretation can be integrated. It examines changes in the composition of copper alloys from the late Iron Age to early Anglo-Saxon period, and includes an illuminating study of Romano-British gunmetal. Bray makes the valuable point that, in contrast to that of the Bronze Age, the ‘vast world of Roman metalwork is barely analysed’ (p. 260). He stresses that the term recycling requires ‘unpacking’ as ‘each material or assemblage will have its own language and logic of reuse/recycling and manipulation, as would each region, period, and society’ (p. 259). Swift explores reuse of finished metal objects, rather than the complexities of their alloys. She highlights the processes taking place during the transitional late Roman to early medieval period, making use of artefacts from accompanied burials. Changes in cultural choices of objects coincided with variability in production capabilities. This fostered not just reuse, but adaptation of artefacts by modification, instead of melting them down for their metal (p. 443). In the third specifically British chapter, Fleming examines the ‘death of recycling’ of building materials during the late- and post-Roman periods. She stresses that the skilful reuse and modification of buildings and materials, often over long periods, was a normal – and skilled – practice throughout the Roman period, not a sign of decline. Like Swift, she underlines the interrelationship between a decrease in traditional skills and an increase in modifying and reusing old materials. Archaeologists should take note of her point that when the construction of wooden buildings became more important, old buildings may have been demolished to salvage large timbers, rather than stone or bricks (p. 417).

The concluding chapter 15 (by seven authors) states that ‘We need to stop considering recycling and reuse as uniquely late antique phenomena – the products of a declining economy – and begin to take them seriously, for the first few centuries AD as well as the periods in which they are more visible’ (p. 456). Two detailed reviews of this book (Gosner in American J. Archaeology and Hoss in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, both 2021) endorsed this conclusion. But in the multi-period journal Technology and Culture, Emmerson argued that the concluding chapter's authors did not have a sufficiently wide perspective: ‘Their contrast between recycling and consumption, however, is inherently modern, based on the realities of the post-industrial world. … Rather than an outlier to the model of Roman consumption, such processes are better approached as integral parts of that model’ (p. 607). Bronze Age specialists have always seen the continual melting and reuse of metal as a given, and in this volume Bray states that ‘It should be stressed at the outset that the term recycling is not particularly useful here’ (p. 238).

The history of archaeology is full of questions prompted by contemporary concerns. The verb ‘recycle’ grew in use from the 1950s in the context of nuclear physics. As a noun, ‘recycling’ became common from the 1970s to describe the conscious use, recovery, reprocessing and remaking of objects and raw materials as a reaction to a consumer economy that generated waste on an unprecedented scale (epitomised by oceanic fields of floating plastic, and fatbergs blocking sewers: Peña, p. 9). Introducing the term ‘recycling’ into the context of the Roman Empire – without the level of analysis found in this book – might imply some sense of environmental responsibility. But, like most empires, the Roman Empire stripped human, animal and mineral resources from conquered territories, inflicting consequential damage on landscapes in pursuit of timber, clay, stone and metal.