Abstract
This paper explores the early stages in the history of fishing in the Aegean Sea in Greece, and highlights its formative phases and its specific characteristics in different points in time. This is testified by various physical remains, such as fish bones, fishing tools, and representations in art, which are gathered in the course of archaeological research. The aquatic resources in the Aegean Sea have been exploited and managed for millennia by communities that lived near the water and often made a living from it. The earliest evidence for a systematic, intensive exploitation of marine resources in the Aegean Sea dates to the Mesolithic, eleven millennia ago. In the Neolithic period, the adoption of a sedentary, agro-pastoral way of life led to a reduction in the intensity of fishing and shellfish gathering. Its importance as an economic resource remained high only in certain regions of rich, eutrophic waters. In the Bronze Age, an era of social complexity and centralized economy, the exploitation of aquatic, mostly marine, resources became a complex, multi-faceted activity which involved subsistence, industry and ideology. The range of preferred fish and invertebrate species, the fishing technology, and the processing of fish and shellfish in order to produce elaborate foods or prestige items are all traceable aspects of the complex relationship between humans and the aquatic resources throughout the prehistory of fishing and shellfish gathering in the Aegean area. The broadening of collaboration between archaeology and physical sciences offers new means to explore these issues in a more thorough and nuanced manner.
Highlights
The aquatic resources of the Hellenic area have been systematically exploited by coastal communities that lived by the sea, the rivers and the lakes, for a very long period of time
The research on the exploitation of aquatic resources in antiquity was vastly enriched in the last decades by the collaboration of archaeology with biology and ecology
This rendered the physical remains of aquatic organisms, such as fish bones, sea shells, etc., eloquent testimonies of past fishing practices
Summary
Ancient fishing is explored through a multi-level approach by archaeology and history. Cave in Argolid [13] and the Cave of Cyclops at Yioura in Sporades [14,15]) and the open air site of Maroulas on Kythnos [16] provide ample evidence for fishing during the early Holocene Excavation at these sites produced thousands of fish bones and scales, as well as a large number of sea shells, marine mammal bones and sea bird bones. Rivers, and the sea in the Neolithic The Mesolithic fishing bonanza, when marine aquatic resources were abundant and intensively exploited in coastal and near-coastal sites did not seem to continue in the following millennia. A storage vessel contained the remains of a large number of red porgy (Pagrus pagrus) of similar size (Figure 11) and several seeds of an unidentified type of cereal It appears that whole fish had been preserved in this vessel, making up the third identified type of a fish processing product at Akrotiri.
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