(Re)Making a Roman City: Refuse, Recycling, and Renovation Across Empire

What was a Roman city if not (more than) the sum of its component parts? Underneath the marble, brick, plaster, and wood adorning urban facades, ancient builders installed the discarded remnants of urban life. Refuse, generated by the city’s inhabitants and industries, was recycled to level the terrain, raise the surface, and fashion the floors. Of the various components that made a Roman city, its own refuse can be considered among the most volumetric. By centering urban waste—a material routinely reused not for its aesthetics or the cultural power it evoked, but instead for its ability to fill space—this project explores the otherwise intangible systems that governed a city’s continuous remaking. This project first considers the types of contexts from which archaeologists recover refuse and how its classification shapes our understanding of the materials. It then examines the processes responsible for waste’s deposition before reconstructing the refuse lifecycles at work in the ancient world and the administrative systems that governed them using ancient literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence. The core of my dissertation investigates the breadth and depth of refuse recycling practices across the Roman world. In the second chapter, I introduce my three case studies, the material culture types selected to serve as a lens into urban (re)building, and the individual methods and approaches I apply to each study. Chapter 3 traces the use of ceramic refuse at Petra (ca. 1st century B.C. - 5th century A.D.), revealing that the waste type was highly desirable and often curated before its use. Chapter 4 explores how faunal data reflect the movement, storage, and transformation of Pompeii’s waste from the 6th century B.C. through the 1st century A.D. Chapter 5 centers Segedunum and its bulk materials to consider how the extramural environment affected waste recycling. Finally, I place the three sites in conversation, noting that an array of urban management systems regulated access to refuse and affected its value. The reuse of refuse was a dynamic practice that (re)built cities across the Roman Empire. Though buried below the cityscapes, yesterday’s meals facilitated the taberna’s remaking; ancestral funerary equipment supported new domestic complexes; and the byproducts of industry created a space for new crafting. The study of waste recycling in the building of cities thus challenges us to (re)consider what was rubbish, what was a relic, what was relevant, and what was a typical Roman practice.