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.

Chapter Four examines how the vocabulary of visual abstraction emerged from the language of nineteenth-century studies in optics and psychology and was supported by developments in the occult sciences and currents in modernist thought. It connects Riegl’s definition of late antique style with these developments.

Chapter Two argues that the interest in and definition of late antique art promoted by Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl was in part spurred by political conditions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Chapter Five considers the definition of mimesis in the visual arts to argue that ancient ideas of visual imitation encompassed a wide range of styles, among them formal solutions modern observers would consider abstract. It posits that the stylistic language deployed by Hermogenes of Tarsus in his rhetorical treatise Peri Ideon can be applied to the description of late antique visual art.