{"id":524236,"date":"2010-04-12T12:26:04","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T16:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=42980"},"modified":"2010-04-12T12:26:04","modified_gmt":"2010-04-12T16:26:04","slug":"medieval-recycling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/524236","title":{"rendered":"Medieval recycling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historian Robin Fleming<\/a>\u2019s recent lecture at Harvard<\/a> was on economic calamity in early medieval Britain, and how people in desperate straits turned to \u201crecycling\u201d Roman ruins for what they needed.<\/p>\n

The Radcliffe Fellow<\/a>, on leave from Boston College<\/a>, used dozens of slides \u2014 of knights in helmets, stone churches, iron fixtures, and more. But one picture was contemporary: a Haitian man, hammer poised in midair, scavenging rebar from post-earthquake rubble.<\/p>\n

Perhaps fifth century Britain, thrown into abject poverty by the withdrawal of Roman power, offers a lesson to the modern world. In some countries, after all, culture, industry, and governance are fragile too, and await the fall of some modern Rome.<\/p>\n

Recycling can earn us a living, early Britain tells us. (The Haitian man agrees; he sold his rebar to Chinese scrap dealers.)<\/p>\n

But the same dark century also says that sometimes recycling is not a way to make money; it is a way simply to survive. Its pervasiveness in a society can reveal a depth of impoverishment so profound that it signals a world devoid of money, factories, literacy, and political structure.<\/p>\n

Without the \u201ccomforting similarity\u201d of life that Rome brought, Fleming said, Britain\u2019s nascent cities emptied out, London among them, and devolved into \u201chighly mobilized, small-scale communities\u201d forced to make do on their own.<\/p>\n

She told an audience of 50 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium that, at around 400 A.D., Rome was beleaguered by wars elsewhere and began to withdraw its soldiers and administrators from remote Britain. The empire also stopped sending shiploads of precious metals to back up the local bronze currency.<\/p>\n

Without \u201cthe unifying force\u201d of the state, its culture, and its manufacturing prowess, said Fleming, Britain was plunged into centuries of economic travail. Within a generation, fifth century Britain \u2014 once \u201cas Roman as any place on the planet,\u201d she said \u2014 was without the production, supply, transportation, and money systems Rome had brought to its colony.<\/p>\n

The result was a population \u201cdeskilled\u201d for centuries and forced to rely on wholesale scavenging, said Fleming. With no money, no industry, and no legacy of craft, there was no one left to quarry stone, smelt metals, or make pottery. (For one thing, she said, Britain was \u201ca-ceramic\u201d for the next 600 years.)<\/p>\n

But there was at least plenty to recycle. By the second decade of the fifth century, Roman-era towns, manufacturing sites, forts, villas, and temple complexes had fallen into ruins. People raided buildings for quarried stone, iron clamps, and hefty 2-pound nails. They stripped lead pipe from deftly engineered water systems. They robbed graves for pottery and cooking utensils.<\/p>\n

But these scavengers also left behind a rich material record of what they stole, recovered, and reused. That\u2019s another lesson from early Britain, this one for historians. The material record, often little valued by scholars, can be richer than the textual record, said Fleming.<\/p>\n

Yet historians of early medieval Britain still cling to text as the preeminent way of shining light on the period. \u201cMost of you think historians are in the past business, but we\u2019re really in the text-interpretation business,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re as attached to the written word as any professor of literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

One famous written source \u2014 just 17 words \u2014 is still so well regarded by scholars that it trumps archaeological evidence, said Fleming. But there are better sources for historians of early medieval Britain, she said: 10,000 kilos of archaeological evidence, for instance, which can be dated to the fifth century.<\/p>\n

Fleming, a one-time junior fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows<\/a>, is using the year at Radcliffe<\/a> to finish her third book, \u201cLiving and Dying in Early Medieval Britain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Text sources are important to her. Among other things, she is a scholar of the Domesday Book<\/a>, the great survey of England\u2019s lands completed in 1086 for William the Conqueror.<\/p>\n

But material culture is also important, she said, in this case the \u201cvast stores of Roman-period material\u201d that Fleming said had piled into ruins after the collapse of Rome in Britain. Thousands of Roman sites became vast repositories for scavengers, who combed ruins for brick, tile, iron, lead, and \u2014 above all \u2014 quarried stone.<\/p>\n

Until the 11th century, virtually all stone used to make early Christian churches was from Roman ruins, said Fleming. And as late as the 14th century \u2014 900 years after the fall of Romanized Britain \u2014 masons were still using Roman brick and tile.<\/p>\n

Architectural surveys of churches built from Roman materials show there were 300 in the London region alone. \u201cEverywhere you look,\u201d said Fleming of present-day British structures, \u201cyou see Roman material.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it was abundant. She used the example of a Roman bath in East Sussex. It was abandoned in the third century, hidden until the 19th under a slag heap, and finally excavated in the 1970s. The simple bath yielded up \u201ca whole universe of brick and tile,\u201d 13 tons of it, said Fleming.<\/p>\n

So vast was the scale of material that salvage operations went on from the fourth to the 20th centuries. Roman engineers had used iron in buildings and walls: clamps, hinges, window grilles, gate pulls, and giant nails. The Coliseum in Rome, Fleming said, offering an example, contains an estimated 300 tons of iron clamps.<\/p>\n

Most scrap metal was reforged. Most villages had lost the art of smelting \u2014 making metal from ore \u2014 but they still had smithies with hot fires. Metal tools that were still useful \u2014 agricultural tools, spoons, harnesses \u2014 were saved from the melting pots.<\/p>\n

Roman pottery, scavenged from dump sites and ritual graves, was popular among medieval recyclers too. But in some communities, old pots were sometimes repurposed, sometimes broken just so their circular bottoms could be used as molds for large-scale brooches.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lesson here for historians, said Fleming. In the absence of reliable narratives about ancient lives, we can recover some of those lives, she said, \u201cif we bother to look at material evidence they left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historian Robin Fleming\u2019s recent lecture at Harvard was on economic calamity in early medieval Britain, and how people in desperate straits turned to \u201crecycling\u201d Roman ruins for what they needed. The Radcliffe Fellow, on leave from Boston College, used dozens of slides \u2014 of knights in helmets, stone churches, iron fixtures, and more. But one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-524236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}