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A Fishy Situation - Ep12
287 Plays6 years ago
Alex and Simona attempt to make it through an entire episode of our most hated type of bone: fish bones. Listen as they talk about the difficulties of dealing with archaeological fish and why they are actually quite important! Oh, and lots of complaining. Ugh...fish bones.
BibliographyKillgrove, K. (2019) Vat of Ancient Fish Sauce May Confirm Date that Pompeii Was Destroyed. Forbes.Luff, R. (1984) Animal Remains in ArchaeologyGreat Britain: Shire ArchaeologyRackham, J. (1994) Interpreting the Past: Animal BonesRyder, M. L. (1968) Animal bones in archaeologyGreat Britain: Blackwell Scientific PublicationsWilkes, E. (2018) Lamprey teeth identified for the first time in London's archaeological record. Phys.org.Archaeological Fish Resource from the University of NottinghamThe North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation (NABO) Fish Identification ManualSwandro-Orkney Coastal Archaeology TrustContactAlex FitzpatrickTwitter: @archaeologyfitzSimona FalangaTwitter: @CrazyBoneLadyMusic"Coconut - (dyalla remix)"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2UiKoouqaY
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Should I start the segment again? Yeah, I think we're all right. We're going to keep in our bullying of you for not having chili, I think.
Episode Introduction: Focus on Fish
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome to the 12th episode of Archaeo Animals. We're still here. In this episode we've decided to finally open Pandora's box and tell you all a little bit about fish.
Challenges with Fish Bones
00:00:56
Speaker
Here is, as always, Simona Falanga, and with me, it's Alex Fitzpatrick and I don't want to talk about fish bones. Hate them.
00:01:09
Speaker
Just getting out of my system now, like give me like one minute to just say, fish bones are annoying. I don't particularly like them. I did my whole master's dissertation on them, so I have every right to be this annoyed about fish bones. I'm constantly getting fish bone splinters in my fingers when I'm working in assemblages, because of course I always seem to work on sites that are just on the coast. So yeah, hate them. They're the worst. And yeah.
00:01:37
Speaker
But I'm going to be the bigger person and I'm going to talk about them with Simona, of course. I kind of prefer the Alex and Shane bit.
00:01:47
Speaker
Well, we can if you want to, I suppose. Yeah, the true issue with this episode is going to be balancing our usual edutainment that we give the audience every month and then me just wanting to scream for a solid hour. And I guess I'm just like my usual bubbly me.
00:02:09
Speaker
But to be fair, it's not just me. I think a lot of zoarchaeologists and archaeologists in general can relate to
00:02:18
Speaker
just being really annoyed by fish bones. Just, they're so tiny! Yeah, they're so small. I mean, most of them are gonna be small, and the problem of course is that even if they're big, they're also quite fragile, so even if they started out big, they will probably end up being pretty small in terms of fragmentation. I don't know about you, Simona, but I've probably destroyed hundreds of fish bones in excavation.
00:02:46
Speaker
I wouldn't know to be honest, because the one thing about fish bones, because the vast majority of them is so small, hand collection is actually quite difficult. Because you can't pay attention to the ground sort of at all times, it's something like that. They're so small that you won't necessarily notice
00:03:04
Speaker
you look at the ground, if that makes sense. So that's something like fish bones is where sampling strategies and something targeted to the recovery of fish bones becomes really vital to sort of get a non-biased sample because hand collection does have its limitations in archaeological field practice. So you will have a bias towards large fish bones.
00:03:29
Speaker
Yeah. Really, that's where samples come into play. And that's when you're going to recover most of your fish and your amphibians and just generic tiny things.
Fish Bones in Archaeological Sites
00:03:38
Speaker
There'll be so many a lot of the time. Like, of course, it depends on your site. But usually when you have fish bones, it never comes really in one or two bits. It's usually in the thousands because they're the devil. They were put here on this planet to annoy me personally. And I hate it.
00:03:58
Speaker
I mean, it's always been the fish-hate thing, let's be real. This is the second episode of fish-hate. I pretty much remember last episode or the episode before, we were apologizing to the fish-hate. I mean, every episode is the fish-hate episode. Well, actually, about that, it's just because it appears that I cannot talk and communicate like a proper person, because I was actually just trying to say the exact opposite, but it came out as fish as human.
00:04:25
Speaker
And I was like, I could correct it. No, it's done now. Sorry, Simona. I think it's just this whole podcast. Obviously, two hosts. I'm extremely anti-fished. They're delicious. But also, I just hate them. And also, can we just talk about morphologically how they're really, really annoying? Because, like,
00:04:44
Speaker
With other animals, when you get their bones, there's usually like one or two like limb bones or skull bits that are really easy to ID. So once you see it, like you'll know exactly what you're dealing with. Fish are literally heads with spines, like that's it. There's nothing else that makes up a fish. So it's the most annoying thing in the world to ID them.
00:05:08
Speaker
also because like pretty much every other group of animals will have pretty much the same bits so if you look at a mammalian humorous or a bird humorous like they'll look different but you'll be able to have a clue as of which element you're looking at with fish it's just
00:05:27
Speaker
Well, I guess, aside from vertebrae, you can pretty much confidently ID your vertebrae, but then it's like, is it one of the first vertebrae of a small fish? Or is one of the last vertebrae of a large fish?
00:05:42
Speaker
Um, so one thing about fish is that, uh, fish grow. I mean, this kind of sounds silly, but fish grow exponentially in size as they get older. So you'll have one species of fish and the vertebrae will be, you can have one that's really, really tiny and one that's really, really big.
Fish Growth and Bone Identification
00:05:59
Speaker
And it could be the same species, but just like different ages. And it's just like something went wrong when fish were created, you know, when the earth was created and fish were created, they're like,
00:06:14
Speaker
Fun fact which I guess is actually not that fun, in fish the vertebrae decrease in size so the largest vertebrae will be at the base of the skull down to the smallest ones that are by the tail fin.
00:06:29
Speaker
It's just the worst. It's the most annoying thing in the world. I guess there's one easy thing. I guess one good point are actually to determine whether you're looking at a fish vertebrae. Aside from all the usual fishy stuff, they can be a little bit shiny and they're very angular and spiky and they've got points and projections everywhere. With the vertebrae, they usually have two processes and then unite into one.
00:06:57
Speaker
sort of like to form the base of the spine. And I think you only really get that in fish. So you have that, I think, say you get then the thoracic vertebrae, and then also you have some lateral ones with the ribs attached. And then in the cordal vertebrae, the two projections that then united to one, you get them at the bottom because then there's another set of spine over there. So it's just pointy bits all over.
00:07:24
Speaker
It's just bits on bits on bits. That's what a fish is. And like, I don't know how I like kind of know a couple of colleagues here in like the British archaeology community that like specifically deal with fish bones and I don't know.
00:07:40
Speaker
Like, I want to know how their brains work. Their brains work on, like, another level than most human beings. Like, you know the whole, like, galaxy brain thing? That's them all the time. That's the only way I can conceive of them being able to, like, pick up, like, tiny fish bones and be like, oh, this is, you know, whatever fish.
00:07:56
Speaker
I think fish experts, along with archaeontomologists, are the true unsung heroes of the environmental archaeology community. Yeah, no. It's just like, hat, hat, hat off to you. I don't know how they do it. It makes me feel like a small child when I hear them talk about their research. And I'm just like, fish, you know, fish. I could barely ID them. Oh, you've done a whole master's on it. Oh, go, go, go yourself, deprecating you.
00:08:25
Speaker
No, the Masters is done. All
Cartilaginous Fish and Preservation
00:08:28
Speaker
that's literally, I handed in my dissertation and all the information I had about fish went along with my dissertation. They just went right out my brain. I don't know anything about fish anymore. To be fair, to be fair.
00:08:40
Speaker
have the same happened with a master dissertation. So even if you're asking me about it, there's just a silent scream in my brain. I remember nothing. And the other thing about fish is I just realized that I'm going to be talking about every like fact we have about fish in a complaint because that's just how I feel right now. The other thing about fish is that it's not you don't always get
00:09:07
Speaker
fish bones but fish can still exist because it's you have bony fish and then you also have like the more cartilaginous fish with cartilage oh gosh here we go
00:09:21
Speaker
Cartilage, I'm not the best person for that. This is going to be 30 minutes of us trying to say this word. But it's fish with cartilage, like sharks, skates, rays. They aren't necessarily made out of the same kind of hard bone that we associate. Not the bony bone. Not the bony bone.
00:09:40
Speaker
Not bone bone, the cat, but a different type of like, I don't know how to describe it really, you have a cartilage. We have cartilage. They just have more of it than we do. So that necessarily doesn't mean that it's going to preserve on an archeological site as well. I mean, you might get the teeth, you might get the teeth. It's also possible the scales preserve, but let's face it, you never get the scales.
00:10:07
Speaker
I would agree with that, except that I had 2,000 fish scales on a site I worked with. So maybe it's just me. Maybe I just have such notoriously bad luck that I've just found all these fish scales. I counted them by hand, Simona. By hand! Well.
00:10:30
Speaker
So about the bony fish, because I think we'll mainly be talking about the bony fish today. And of course, there's several different species, of course, like, you know, in zoology, you deal with the usual domesticates and your wild mammals. And sometimes you do get your rodents and a few, like, species that aren't really meant to be there. But then when you go into the fish realm, you have in the British Isles alone, we have about 140 species
00:10:59
Speaker
Of sea fish. 140 too many. That's already too many. And 34 of freshwater fish. There should be three in general. Just three species of fish.
00:11:09
Speaker
And overall, we're thinking native will not add all the species that we've introduced over time, some later than others, that's just, yeah, we'll leave that under key, just locked away. I mean, it could be worse, it could be insects, or there'll be like, thousands and thousands of species. Merle Yeah, I don't think we're ever gonna cover insects on here. One, because it's not technically the archaeology. And two, it seems really, really hard. And I don't understand it.
00:11:34
Speaker
They're animals too. I guess, but I don't know. She's not only fish-hating, she's also insect-hating. Yeah, yeah. Wait, don't get me started on anything else in Zoo Archaeology apparently. People listen to this podcast and they're just like, why are you still a Zoo Archaeologist? I do like it, I promise. I just love complaining.
00:12:01
Speaker
like, as a professional zookeologist, you make like, you know, great advertising for people who'd like to get into the field and it's like, oh, or maybe not then. Yeah, I'm doing a lot of service. Back to fish anyway. Can we talk about the skulls too? Because that's probably the worst thing about fish bones. Well, you read my mind somehow. Because saying, you know, like I always said, they're essentially skulls with a
00:12:31
Speaker
like vertebral column attached to it, and that's about it. I mean, and the fins, but yeah, who cares. So like the skull in fish is usually, correct me if I'm wrong, you're the fish expert here, I'm afraid. They are generally divided into three parts. So you get your cranium and your jaws, like your wood and any other animal, and then you get the gill arches as well, just as just a spice it up.
00:12:54
Speaker
And again, to spice it up even more, I mean, if you ever had a fish dinner, you would have noticed that the skull falls apart very quickly. So you're not very likely to find the skull intact in a day after your dinner setting, let alone an archaeological setting.
00:13:14
Speaker
But you do get bits and pieces, and the problem is we'll have pictures, of course, from me, because I'm just surrounded by these things all the time. But we'll have pictures in the show notes of a couple of fish cranial bits, and they're just so complicated.
00:13:33
Speaker
Honestly, I've pulled apart so many fish at this point in my life that I still don't really know how they come together. Everything's just weirdly shaped and very fragile and there's so many pieces. Off the top of my head, I can't tell you how many individual elements make up the fish cranium, but I want to say that.
00:13:55
Speaker
A billion, maybe? A bajillion? I feel like it's a rough estimate. And also think why I think it's so difficult with fish, because again, by my own admission, I'm not great with birds myself. But at the same time, in terms of elements, you know what you're looking for. I'll say, okay, that's a tibia tarsus. I've got no idea what species of bird that belongs to, but I've got a vague idea what I'm looking at.
00:14:20
Speaker
with fish is like you pick up a bone and it's like, what even is this? Where does it go? Where does it fit? It's like a really bad puzzle, a puzzle of despair.
00:14:32
Speaker
and like even the bits that you think you know like here's something that like literally took me like two years to kind of figure out is if you look at like the jaw bits of a fish honestly if you look at for the first time you'll think it goes one way but it's actually like upside down like i used to like
00:14:50
Speaker
side, or at least like identify which side the part of the bone is from wrong because I'd be holding it upside down because it just doesn't make sense. The way it looked like it, it just doesn't make sense. I don't know who messed up when they made the skeleton of a fish, but just forget everything you know.
00:15:08
Speaker
And to be honest, I will also say like it is genuine for people out there who are starting to do like zoo archaeology and like one. If you get frustrated about fish, don't feel like it's a feeling of yourself because they are. I don't know if you could tell from us complaining about it. They are genuinely really hard. I mean, even with a reference collection, I find that it can be difficult to ID fish.
00:15:31
Speaker
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Also, because you don't have the same pointers in terms of aging. So if you find a bone again, a mammalian bone, that it's quite small, but then you see that it's not fully fused, I think, okay, that might be from a young animal, it's not necessarily a small thing.
00:15:50
Speaker
fish, of course, you don't get any of that. Because there's a, again, correct me if I'm wrong. There's about two things that you can use to age fish. So you can look at some growth rings on the scales, which you rarely recover, or similar rings on what are called the otoliths.
00:16:13
Speaker
M1s, the ear stones which are essentially elongated aggregations of aragonite and if like me you have no idea what aragonite is, it's a crystal form of calcium carbonate. Guess what? You barely recover those as well.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah, no. I remember once getting really excited because I found an otolith for the first time in my life and it turned out it was just a really big fish scale. The sadness that I felt that day has not been matched in my lifetime. One day the sadness will end.
00:16:47
Speaker
It won't because there's still fish bones out there, so I'm just gonna have to keep dealing with that. But I will also say that you can also tell age based on the rings on the vertebrae as well, like on the body of the vertebrae. If you look at it, there's like the rings in the same way that you would have on a tree stump. You can kind of tell the age from that as well, so at least that's slightly better, but it's still not great.
00:17:16
Speaker
When it comes to different kinds of fish, how different are the skulls? No, no, this is a simple question. How do you know that a smaller fish head is not just a juvenile fish rather than an actually different fish? Skull-wise, when we look at animals, we can tell differences in skulls from the way they teeth are positioned and stuff. Are fish skulls pretty similar?
00:17:46
Speaker
Um, they're pretty similar. The problem, especially with working here in Britain, is that, especially in more like Iron Age type, Neolithic type settlements, you tend to get mostly gatids, which are, you know,
00:18:02
Speaker
Atlantic Cod, Safe, Pollock, things like that, and they all kind of look exactly alike. So at the very least, you could probably differentiate with a gatted skull because they have kind of a unique jaw with very distinguishable teeth.
00:18:20
Speaker
Other fish will have different, because there's different types of fish teeth. I don't know if you know that. Some fish will have like pointy, long ones. Some will have like more bumpy ones. Some freaky ones will also have more like human looking teeth and it's horrible and hate it. Yeah, it's awful. Did you know fish like teeth go all the way like down their throat? Fish are like the worst creatures. Some got them on the roof of their mouths as well. That's just not necessary.
00:18:50
Speaker
Okay, it's with this very enthusiastic statement. We will wrap up, unfortunately not the episode, we'll just wrap up this one segment and we will be back to tell you some more about fish.
00:19:05
Speaker
Chris Webster here for the Archeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that
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Speaker
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00:20:26
Speaker
And we're back on our 12th episode of Archaeo Animals. Still Simona
Chili Discussion and Future Tasting Plans
00:20:32
Speaker
and Alex. Unfortunately. Still Alex. Still sort of thinking about Chilly. Hang on my thread. Yeah, I'm thinking about Chilly. Veggie of Chilly. So, you know, just saying. But it's a fish chili.
00:20:49
Speaker
Ugh, is that a thing? I mean, it's probably a thing. It's probably quite nice to be honest, I really like fish. No, I've never had chili anyway, so I'm not on television. What? Sorry, can we like put the episode on hold so we can... We'll wait, what? Sorry, no, we'll get back onto it. But we're having this conversation later about you not having chili. That's weird, I'm sorry. I've never had chili. Oh, God.
00:21:18
Speaker
Sorry. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, that's even weirder. You've never had chili. No. Right. That's weird. What? How can you go through your life without it?
00:21:33
Speaker
uh okay right right this yeah like this you know this is for later this is still weird this is for later honestly it's still weird yes anybody anyone listening have you never had chili please yeah right to us like this is weird okay right sorry fish
00:21:52
Speaker
So what can fish bones actually tell us about archaeological site and past populations? Is there a point to fish bones? Alas, yes, there are many points of why studying fish remains is very important. They tell us a lot about the environment that past populations lived in, they tell us about their diet, their technology, their trade routes,
00:22:16
Speaker
your neighbor, all sorts, because fish. I hate to give it to fish, but they are very important. And the great duality of man is within me as I hate fish, but also I'm a big proponent of more archaeologists looking at fish.
00:22:33
Speaker
The thing with fish is that they lend themselves very well for paleo-environmental reconstructions because there's many species of fish and a lot of them do tend to be quite niche and they're adapted to very specific temperatures and climates.
00:22:49
Speaker
So the presence or absence of a particular species can actually tell us a lot about the environment. So one example that I stumbled across is some research that Dr. Wheeler was doing in Orkney, in Qantenes, if I pronounced that correctly. From that site, it was Neolithic, in the Neolithic layers, they recovered cork winged wrasse.
00:23:16
Speaker
which doesn't occur in that area anymore because it actually lives in much warmer climates. So from that, the E could infer that the seas were warmer in the Orkneys in the Neolithic period than they are now.
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah. And like the good thing about fish is that a lot of the fish that we had in the past are still around in some kind of variation. So we can compare data that we have from fish and fisheries that exist right now.
00:23:49
Speaker
with
Insights from Fish Bones on Diet and Environment
00:23:50
Speaker
the fish that we have from the past. So like you said, we can see kind of what the environment was like, like the temperature, the seasonality, we can find out. I mean, we can also infer from the fish that we have, like what kind of predators might've been around to eat these fish, especially depending on what the fish bones are like once we have them. We could say, oh, these are clearly being eaten by so-and-so animal. So you get that kind of like chain
00:24:18
Speaker
again, mostly inferring, but still, you know, it's more kind of information that we didn't have before. And also because you can find I guess that links us on to diet, you can find fish bones, I guess bones in general that show signs of having been digested. Yep.
00:24:41
Speaker
It's very strange. I've seen this a few times now and basically there are some fish that are small enough that the way you would eat it is you would basically just kind of cook it over fire and then eat it whole.
00:24:56
Speaker
So you would get these, like the vertebrae, digested. They would become more compressed and like slightly eroded from being digested. And this could be, this isn't just humans. Some like seals and stuff will eat fish this way as well. And so I've spent many hours using an electron microscope to see if fish bones had been digested and pooed out. Fun. It's a charming job, isn't it?
00:25:23
Speaker
I got a master's degree doing that. So yeah, there's worse things you could do, I guess. So yeah, and of course, you know, they tell us about the diets of fast populations, of course, it's something that we can't, we don't just get from the presence of absence of fish bones. You can also look at isotope, like stable isotope levels in the human remains themselves and see whether they had a more plant based or animal based diet.
00:25:49
Speaker
if they had an animal based diet, whether it was marine, like terrestrial mammal or marine animals, because if it's marine animals, like the isotope levels just skyrocket through the roof. Yeah, it's a nitrogen, right? Yeah, the nitrogen levels. That's right. Yeah, this carbon for plant based and nitrogen for
00:26:11
Speaker
Yeah, having a nice toast in a while. That's another way of telling, I guess, as opposed to finding the fish itself. But it also, I guess, based on what bones we recover and the way it was processed, we can see whether they were, whether they were eaten or whether they were
00:26:29
Speaker
both taken and processed and eaten at the same site, a bit like when we talked about kill sites in the hunting episode, or whether they use them for non-consumption reasons, just like to make oil, which we have extensively done in the past. It is still done in some parts of the world today.
00:26:49
Speaker
to get oil from fish. One thing I like about the diet component is that we have some examples of people using isotope analysis and seeing like fish bones from related sites to talk about like varying types of subsistence.
Exotic Fish and Historical Trade Routes
00:27:08
Speaker
So there, I can't think of the actual names of the sites off the top of my head. I apologize for that.
00:27:14
Speaker
But there are some instances of settlements that have turned to more marine diets as a way to supplement their diets in the face of things like famine. So not only do you get what they were eating, you also get kind of these big events that were happening in these settlements at that time that you wouldn't necessarily know of from other aspects of the archaeological record. Yeah.
00:27:43
Speaker
See, I know things. Other things that you can learn from fish remains, of course, is the technology that the past population would have had at their disposal. So like, because to catch a certain type of fish, you may need some more or less specialized equipment. So whether it's a line and hook or nets or deep sea fishing and whatnot.
00:28:06
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know an awful lot about fishing, which is I shouldn't know more because I come from a place where there is a lot of reliance on fish for very obvious reasons. And that's been so thousands of years, but I don't know much about fishing myself. I must admit. Really? Huh.
00:28:25
Speaker
So we got to go fishing and we got to go make some chiller. Anything else we need to do at some point? I'll put them on my bucket list. Yeah. So basically it's not just, like you said, kind of the fishing equipment like line and hook and nets, which have developed over time as well. But when we say like deep sea fishing, we mean that it's more technological advances such as, you know, how they get there sailing.
00:28:55
Speaker
of how they've built the boats to get there, all the other kind of more specialized equipment they would need to get these fish that are probably more into the ocean rather than coastal, which to be fair, like a lot of prehistoric fish bones that we find in a more consumption setting tend to be like coastal or shallow fish. So you would just need either a net or a line or hook. I mean,
00:29:24
Speaker
There's even some instances where fish might have been scavenged through rock pools, which are on the beach, so they're not necessarily that hard to get to. That doesn't necessarily imply a lack of technology in itself. It's just, if it's easier and it is right there, then why not? Exactly, yeah. It's like getting muscles and stuff, if you can get that pretty easy. Why would you make more work for yourself?
00:29:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I love mussels. I was just wondering, you know, obviously fish exist in rivers and stuff as well. So like, what's what technology? Do they? Yeah. Oh, no. No, it's because you were talking about sailing and fishing gear for like deep side diving. You're talking about rock pools and this is like quite coastal stuff. I'm just wondering what sort of technology do we use inland?
00:30:18
Speaker
I mean, it's mostly the same depending on, because obviously it's not just rivers, you know, you have, you have, you can have rivers, you can have small, like, brooks or creeks, but you can also have huge lakes. Freshwater fish is kind of the same thing in that, you know,
00:30:33
Speaker
for the more shallow stuff, line and hook. Especially in rivers, I think it's mostly things like nets, which depending on how wide the river is, you can obviously set up a thing there. And then if you have something as big as a lake or even a pretty big pond, you'd still have the kind of similar technologies you'd have for deep sea fishing. Specifically, you'd need some kind of apparatus to take you to the middle of that body of water, like a boat or some kind of
00:31:03
Speaker
thing like that.
00:31:04
Speaker
And of course there's also, in a way, like I can't think of the right, the correct English term for it, like not cultivated fish, so you don't cultivate fish, but fish that were there in artificial ponds for a reason, because they wouldn't be kept and then like in some instances you do find fishwares that would have separated the younger fish from the older ones to avoid the older ones, you know, eating them and stuff, or special sort of wooden cages that they would have made for eels.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Because you do tend to find, I mean, not sure about an amount, but you do find them especially in medieval archaeology. And you tend to find those. Yeah, that's why I usually associate them with. I just sort of like, and I think it's in the medieval period as well that you do also start to see a shift in the fish that you find in archaeological sites. Because as the market and technologies have
00:32:01
Speaker
changed than sort of people like the species that you find have changed with it. So like
Medieval Fish Consumption and Social Class
00:32:08
Speaker
one big thing that you find in a lot of European urban settlements in the medieval period is like a big white and stockfish industry.
00:32:18
Speaker
And in that particular instance, because of the lack of heads that you tend to find on sites of this time period in Europe, it's believed that the fish would have been sort of gutted and they headed on site, sometimes filleted as well. And then it would have been dried, salted and then traded to the population centers where you then find the remains.
00:32:39
Speaker
Yeah, whether or not a fish skull is present is often used as a big signifier of trading. Of course, we could have been that we just didn't find the skull bits, but for the most part, it can indicate that these fish had been taken from another place, especially if you have something like, say, freshwater fish found near a coast. Talking about trade and stuff, I think leads us into the last
00:33:07
Speaker
kind of big component of what fish can tell us, which is trade and also status. With the assumption that more foreign fish, fish that would have to be taken a very long way, appearing in assemblages, you're probably dealing with something of more of a higher status. It's not necessarily something that you really see with fish a lot of times. I don't know if you run into it more, Simona, but like,
00:33:37
Speaker
Well, I can't think of any specific examples in terms of sites, but I know there is a generic trend. And again, we're talking medieval sites more than anything. So when people have compared sort of like within the same geographical area, you would have had a settlement of just like where the population lived and then a castle or somewhere where nobles lived. And there is a marked difference in the species of fish that you'll find in both.
00:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, so I cannot infer us to what speed I can't think of a specific example of the top of my head, but it is something that does happen like fish, like especially sort of like from what I've read in the medieval period, it is a very good indicator of status.
00:34:24
Speaker
And I mean, it makes sense too, especially if we're dealing with traded fish from quote unquote far away lands. The idea of exoticism in general when it comes to animal remains, especially in places like the medieval period, usually can be correlated to status. Meanwhile, nowadays it's still kind of the same because I mean, like,
00:34:49
Speaker
There's some real good fish that I would love to eat right now. I'm definitely not thinking about dinner right now. Sushi's expensive, you know? I think you are thinking you can put dinner again. Oh man, I'd love to find some archaeological sushi. Archaeological sushi? Yeah. I would eat it.
00:35:09
Speaker
Neolithic nigiri? Oh my god, I would eat it. Like honestly, like I know people like always share that article about the bog brother and then like, oh, I would eat that. Like I, if I found like, yeah, like sashimi from like the Neolithic period, I would chomp on that so quickly. No one would have time to- Alex, do not eat the archaeology. Don't tell me what to do. Do not eat the heritage. I never get to have any fun.
00:35:35
Speaker
What about the sarcophagus juice, the bog butter, honey from like ancient Egypt? I'm pretty sure that survived. Oh yeah, there's always like stories of like there's those things someone shared on Twitter that were like basically donuts from like the Bronze Age.
00:35:52
Speaker
Yes. Well, they're more like Cheerios, weren't they? Like kind of like... You know what they are? They're more like going in my stomach if I go near them. This is why I work with animal bones. You can't really chomp on them. Something I'd heard years ago about like serving like mammoth meat that was found in the Siberian permafrost.
00:36:15
Speaker
Oh man, I'd fry that up so fast. What a time to be alive. I'm gonna die this way, guys. She's gonna die doing what she loved most, eating the archaeology.
00:36:29
Speaker
science as well you can like describe it have your own yeah on my death bed my death rattle will be me going it was really good worth it all right i think uh yeah it's a time for another break then please i think so if you have archaeological sashimi uh please send it to me DM me i'll give you my trust i would love to eat it
00:36:59
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:37:19
Speaker
And we are back and I am still without archaeological sushi, so, you know, thanks for that, everyone, for not sending me archaeological sushi right away. But I guess we can do some case studies soon, huh?
00:37:34
Speaker
Yes, I think the case study is pretty much essentially your master's dissertation. I can tell everyone about it if you'd like me to. I'll probably butcher it, which I guess is it's fitting for a zoo archaeology podcast, but perhaps you should discuss it.
00:37:53
Speaker
Okay. Well, I've probably mentioned it before in between all of me ranting about how much I hate fish. But I used to work in the Orkney Islands, which are a series of islands up north of Scotland. And one of the things that I ended up working on is fish bones from Rousey.
00:38:14
Speaker
which
Fish Consumption in Iron Age Orkney
00:38:15
Speaker
is one of the Orkney Islands. So basically, there's this kind of commonly accepted idea, maybe not so much in the past couple of years, that in the British Iron Age, people just kind of stopped eating fish. It just wasn't necessarily a thing anymore. So there's a lot of ideas of fish becoming taboo in the Iron Age or, you know, some kind of
00:38:40
Speaker
issue happening. But the problem is that's clearly not true everywhere, especially in the North Atlantic Isles, which is where the Orkneys are. So my master's dissertation was taking all of these fish bones that we had from the coastal site of Swandro.
00:38:59
Speaker
and basically kind of examining them, seeing are they just natural deposits, because we are on the coast. I mean, you're going to find fish bones on the coast of an island, where they actually consumed, where they processed it anyways, things like that. So long story short, yeah, there was fishing in the British Iron Age in the Orkney Islands, because duh, of course there would be.
00:39:27
Speaker
I basically looked at almost 3,000 fish bones, which makes me sad to think about because that's so much time of my life that I spent looking at tiny fish bones that I will never get back. By doing stuff like electron microscopy and isotope analysis, I've been able to see that there were signs of consumption on some of these fish bones. A lot of them had been burnt, so they were probably cooked.
00:39:55
Speaker
and things like that. And they're also like at a part of the site where they clearly were being processed because they're all like kind of in one place. And the fact that we also had fish skull bones show that these weren't like traded really, they were probably just processed on site and then eaten. Because the site of Cewando is mostly like a settlement site that was used by the Pictish and then eventually used by Vikings. So
00:40:24
Speaker
Yeah, no. Take that, archeologists who said there were no fishing in the British Iron Age. You're wrong. That was actually the conclusion of my dissertation. With the aha at the end and everything. Yeah.
00:40:39
Speaker
I mean, that is just archaeological research, isn't it? Just like saying, ha, you're wrong. Yeah, I mean, those are all of my papers. If anyone's read my papers, you'll notice that every single conclusion is, ha, you're wrong. No wonder why they keep getting rejected. I was intending to read your papers. Sorry about that. You gave me scientific spoilers. All of my papers end with me taunting other archaeologists.
00:41:08
Speaker
have to put like every time we do a case study now we'll just put a spoiler alert at the beginning just in case people don't want the paper spoiled.
00:41:16
Speaker
Oh my gosh, can you imagine? Don't tell me about those spoilers. Doesn't most abstracts have a conclusion at least? Yeah, that's why you don't read the abstract. You don't want to get spoiled. You skip the abstract, you go write the introduction. But how do you know if the paper's useful to you if you don't read the abstract? But if you read the abstract, you know whether it's relevant to what you're doing or not.
00:41:39
Speaker
Yeah, and there's also, of course, I'm not gonna say it was me, but there are certainly lots of people who, during their undergraduate and graduate days, would only read the abstract and absolutely nothing else from the paper. Definitely not me. Definitely wasn't me. Nope. I've never read an abstract in my life.
00:42:02
Speaker
But yeah, anyway, I mean, my mass registration is very cut and dry type of fish analysis, which I guess is kind of like a pun cut and dry fish. I don't know. But, you know.
00:42:18
Speaker
It's yummy. Speaking of yummy, our next case study, probably a bit more delicious than my master's dissertation. Fish sauce, anyone? Fish sauce.
Pompeii Fish Sauce Jars Discovery
00:42:33
Speaker
So, we'll have a link, of course, to the original story in our show notes, but this was actually pretty recent that they found all of these fish sauce, or like jars and jars of fish sauce that might help confirm the date that Pompeii was destroyed.
00:42:53
Speaker
Yeah, and not just that as if that in itself wasn't, you know, a great discovery, but could also get information about the fish's age and sort of like, the seasonality with which there were fish because of course, you know, fishing is also affected by the seasons. And I forgot how to speak again, because fish sauce
00:43:15
Speaker
I mean, how much do you know about garum? Is that how you say it? It's like a fermented fish sauce. I've definitely run across it in reading when I was doing Roman archaeology. Yeah, it's very much just garum. It's exactly the same, just with a rolled up. But then again, that's presuming that that's how the Romans would have pronounced it. And frankly, we don't know. We probably don't know.
00:43:43
Speaker
I don't know how to roll my R's, I just want to put that out there into the universe.
00:43:49
Speaker
made from anchovies, pickerels, or a mixture of the two. Okay, so it's a fish source, a fish source that is, it's not a source that goes with fish, it's a source that has fish in it. Yeah. They're done, or hello, if they found fish remains or they dated. Hello me. No, it's not something I've really encountered. And because normally,
00:44:14
Speaker
So back home to us, fish sauce is essentially just olive oil, lemon juice, salt and a bit of parsley. Yeah. Garlic. Everyone here hates it. 100% of people in this country that have cooked this for and have tried it, found it vile. Sounds right. It makes me feel very lonely. It's just me and my fish sauce.
00:44:43
Speaker
Maybe we should learn how to make this fermented fish sauce because apparently it's just a bunch of fermented fish that was commonly eaten in the Roman period. Like you said, because there's bits of fish within this sauce, we could basically take the age, the seasonality from which they were probably caught based on the age to help with dating the actual
00:45:13
Speaker
day that Pompey was destroyed. Because I think we have like an idea of a date, but we don't necessarily have like a hard confirmation about it. But what I like about this case study is that it's another example of just kind of like last minute analysis on fish bones. Apparently these kind of things, we just had them, but no one bothered to look at them because archaeologists are just adverse to fish bones in general.
00:45:38
Speaker
Just because I guess it's something quite niche, I don't think that there aren't as many people as you think that specialize in it.
00:45:46
Speaker
And then I find out there's like thousands and thousands of fish experts too, in which case I do apologize. There are definitely people who specialize in it, but I think that in general, we don't necessarily like see it as like, quote unquote, important. I mean, it's something, it's a problem in archaeology in general, where, you know, what's the one artifact that everyone wants to find? It's something gold, something expensive, something, you know, mostly intact. Just not for bones.
00:46:15
Speaker
sort of shifting perspectives because it was in the not too distant past. People would be like, oh, bone.
00:46:24
Speaker
Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, the site that I'm working on now, we're missing a lot of bones because they basically dug it up in the 1930s and then went, we don't need this, I just tossed them. So yeah, I feel like that's just, it's just an attitude issue. And I think, well, at least within the last decade or so, we're finally getting more people interested into the really, really niche. I mean, you have people who are looking at pollen.
00:46:49
Speaker
which is, again, just completely out of my expertise at all whatsoever. I'll never understand it. But, you know, it's important and cool and helps us learn more about the past. But like, you know, 10 years ago, no one would be looking at that.
00:47:05
Speaker
And I find it is actually among one of the more important materials because it tells you about the actual people that live there, stuff like archaeobotany or environmental archaeology, zoo archaeology, like they reconstruct the environment and the people that live there. Yeah, I mean, the very pretty brooch. Okay, it's a beautiful brooch.
00:47:25
Speaker
But there's only so much that tells you. Yeah, especially because a lot of the stuff ends up being like a status thing. So you're also not looking at, you know, the average person. Rather, you're probably going to be looking at like the wealthiest person. So I mean, yeah, that's the thing. As much as I will complain about fish bones and rant about them and say how much I dislike them.
00:47:46
Speaker
I am still a huge proponent of the fact that I think we as archaeologists, or at least as a discipline, need to be training more people and also putting more effort and time and money towards doing more fish analysis because it's super important and it can tell you so much about sight.
00:48:05
Speaker
Absolutely. No, I agree. And with that in mind, did you like this last case study that I posted? It's one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life.
00:48:19
Speaker
Would you like to take it away? Last
Medieval Lamprey Teeth Discovery in London
00:48:23
Speaker
year, apparently, the October-y part of last year, they found the first ever recovered lamprey teeth in the archaeological record of London.
00:48:37
Speaker
And lamprey are these horrible fish that, to me, they always look like leeches. I used to mix them up with leeches whenever I saw a picture of them when I was younger. We'll obviously have a link to the story in our show notes so you can see a horrible picture of these awful, awful fish for yourself.
00:48:58
Speaker
But apparently we've had textual evidence of lamprey consumption, which is disgusting. Again, like in the medieval period, and this was the first time we'd actually had physical evidence of lamprey in London. So yeah, that's disgusting, and I hate it.
00:49:22
Speaker
But I mean, I think what this story is, other than disgusting and I hate their teeth and they're horrible and fish teeth are terrible, I also think this is a really good indication of just how hard it can be to identify and find fish bones. Because again, you know, it's London. London's been dug up.
00:49:44
Speaker
are dug and changed for how many times over the past hundreds of years, and they've only found lamprey teeth this one time. As I said, anyone who knows fish bones, they're unsung heroes of archaeology.
00:50:01
Speaker
Truly, yeah. And I would love to know who's the one person who finally found them and was like, hey, this is actually something probably interesting. Because I think a lot of archaeologists would probably just toss fish bones over their shoulder if they could. Hopefully not. I've definitely seen it in person. I've seen it in person, to be honest. I won't name names, but I have seen people just be like, ugh, it's fish bone. Oh. It was me. No, I'm just kidding. It wasn't me.
00:50:29
Speaker
I'm good. I always click the fish bones. The great irony was I collected all these fish bones being like, you know, maybe we'll actually need to use them in Orkney. And then it turns out that I was the person who had to use them. I'm cursed. You're being called that as well.
00:50:49
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's actually a fish. There's a fish outside my house right now honking at me because it knows that I'm just being really mean about it. There's a protest actually going on right outside my house now of just fish. It's amazing. They're all flopping around. They're all dying very quickly. It's kind of sad. Okay.
00:51:09
Speaker
What a downer of an episode. Actually, actually, we'll be talking about Drowners there. Oh, spoilers. Oh, yeah. Just to explain, because Tristan was mentioning Drowners and it's like actually not recording next week. Well, we'll be talking about Drowners because Drowner appears to be the name of one of the creatures that we've selected for our video game zoo archaeology episode.
00:51:38
Speaker
Yeah, so look forward to that. If you're listening to this episode, that will be coming out next month. So you'll have a little bit longer to wait, but that should be good. But yeah, I think should we wrap up the episode? I don't know if I have it in me to talk anymore about fish, unless you have any questions that you want to throw at me because you're mean and hate me. No, it's because I'm generally interested. I try not to make them too awkward.
00:52:00
Speaker
But what I find quite interesting when you're talking about fish is that these are a very prominent piece of our history. We find fish, especially in Britain because of all the coast. Is there any weird places to find fish in the UK? You're talking about where fish being traded.
00:52:23
Speaker
Do we see any Mediterranean fish in the UK? Is there any status fish in the UK that we know of?
00:52:33
Speaker
I mean, the Mediterranean fish is yes and no, because there's an example that it's also in the Orkney Islands, and it's from a Viking site, but the name escapes me at the minute, and you do find a fish that it wasn't transported from the Mediterranean. It was a fish that lived there during those times because the seas were warm up, and now you don't find them there anymore, but you do find them in the Mediterranean. So in that sense, yes.
00:53:05
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it really depends also on the species type. The most quote-unquote unusual fish I've ever found is a random monkfish jaw on a site. Monkfish basically being like an angler kind of fish, which I'm still convinced was only kept on site because someone accidentally caught it and thought it looked cool.
00:53:27
Speaker
Oh, and just one last little question. Hello. Um, in New York, New Orleans. So, uh, Iron Age fishing, how, how did people fish in the Iron Age? Was it like nets or spears?
00:53:43
Speaker
I believe it was line and hook, because we have some evidence that we found from Excavating of fishing equipment, and I believe most of it was lines and weights that you would put to help fish. And I think we have some evidence of nets as well.
00:54:03
Speaker
But yeah, there's definitely a lot, because a lot of the fishing that they ended up doing, at least on our site, was more coastal, so they didn't necessarily need anything that, you know, heavy duty. But yeah, oh gosh, I want sushi so bad now. I think it's time to wrap up the episode so I can go outside to where the fish are protesting and have now died and pick them up and eat them.
00:54:31
Speaker
So you're just going to throw away the chili or just send me the chili. Yeah, I'll send you the chili and I'll eat the fish that I've been protesting outside my house. There's a lot of lore in this episode I've realized. So if you're following, you know, get your little RQ animals lore book out. Make sure, make sure you have your notes done. It's so you can keep up with all the different like skill sets that everybody has, you know, you know, people have natural twenties, have a D6 on jokes, you know.
00:54:59
Speaker
Canonically, there are fish NPCs outside my house right now. I have a plus five against all fish enemies. So yeah, keep track of that. You will be tested in the next couple of episodes. See, this is really definitely foreshadowing the next episode. It's going to be good.
00:55:16
Speaker
It's going to be good. But in the meantime, I'm excited. Sorry. I think that is the most research I've done on an episode ever. I've written so much that I've gone over the word limit.
00:55:32
Speaker
Alright, well let's stop hyping it up because it's kind of mean to people because they won't hear in the next episode for like another month. But I think that's kind of it for us. It's been an episode. Thanks for listening to us rant about fish bones. I am so hungry.
00:55:55
Speaker
As always, it's been me, Alxis Patrick, and... And Savannah Falanga, and Bastet's been here as well to tell us all how much she actually hates fish. And that was our episode of Archaeo Animals. Be sure to like, subscribe, send us questions, complaints about how we don't like fish, whatever you want, and yeah, that's it. Bye! Bye!
00:56:32
Speaker
Thank you for listening to RQ animals. Please subscribe and rate the podcast wherever you get your podcast from. You can find us on Twitter at RQ animals. Also, the views expressed on the podcast are those of ourselves, the hosts and guests, and do not necessarily represent those of our institution, employers and the RQOG podcast network. Thanks for listening.
00:56:58
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:57:20
Speaker
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