Episode 193 - Fruits de la Mer

Welcome to episode one of our themed month: The Dirt at Sea! The oceans (and seas and lagoons and fjords and so on) have provided people with food and other resources for hundreds of thousands of years. We’ll be discussing some examples of this from the archaeological record. We’ll also investigate how archaeology can get at the relationship between people and the big blue – and it’s much more than just reconstructing ancient coastlines.

Links

• Living Ocean (NASA Science)

• Last Interglacial Iberian Neandertals as fisher-hunter-gatherers (Science)

• Neanderthals Really Liked Seafood (Smithsonian)

• Indigenous oyster fisheries persisted for millennia and should inform future management (Nature Communications)

• North American and Australian Indigenous Communities Farmed Oysters for 5,000-10,000 Years (Sci-News)

• Research Shares Importance Of Studying Indigenous Oyster Farming History (Tasting Table)

• Indigenous oyster fisheries were ‘fundamentally different’: Q&A with researcher Marco Hatch (Mongabay)

• Cetacean exploitation in Roman and medieval London (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports)

• Guidance Note for Dealing with Stranded Whales, Dolphins and other large Marine Wildlife on Kent Coast (Kent City Council)

• Seeking Prehistoric Fermented Food in Japan and Korea (Current Anthropology)

• Thule Winter House (The Canadian Encyclopedia)

• Ancient seafarers may have hunted whales around the world (Science)

• Archaeologists Unearth Hollowed-Out Whale Vertebra Containing Human Jawbone, Remains of Newborn Lambs (Smithsonian)

• The Earliest Shell Fishhooks From The Americas Reveal Fishing Technology Of Pleistocene Maritime Foragers (American Antiquity)

• More Than 30 Million Years Ago, Monkeys Rafted Across the Atlantic to South America (Smithsonian)

• Human evolution: Small remains still pose big problems (Nature)

• On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners (New York Times)

• Scientists reveal how seascapes of the ancient world shaped genetic structure of European populations (Science Daily)

Image: Seafood platter, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)