The potential of copper-alloy objects to be re-melted and recast is a powerful property, allowing them to be reused, reshaped, merged, split, and re-contextualized almost without limit. This profound mutability has significant implications:. identifying and quantifying recycling is a notorious and significant challenge, at least within the framework of the ‘provenance hypothesis’, which aims to establish a direct link between a chemical or isotopic signature of an artefact and its original ore source. This chapter proposes alternative approaches to chemical data—a ‘characterization hypothesis’. Rather than chemically identifying a separate block of ‘recycled metal’, we can instead define a series of overlapping processes of metal melting, mixing, and manipulation. Instead of replacing the search for a provenance signal with one for a recycling signal, we should instead embrace the intricacies of the archaeological and chemical record. This complexity more accurately represents the multifaceted Roman relationship with copper and its alloys.