Abstract
Abstract. Project ‘U Mari examines the long-term relationship between the sea, coast, and local peoples through the various lenses of maritime mobilities, interactions, and livelihoods along the shore of southeast Sicily, specifically between the Vendicari Reserve and Capo Passero. With an eye toward valorizing the ‘mattanza’ as intangible cultural heritage, our work focuses on the rich material remains of this distinctive Mediterranean form of bluefin tuna trap fishing, using 3D recording and visualization of its associated objects, spaces, and landscapes to relate vivid diachronic stories for the public. Our methodology integrates archaeological survey of the landscape, architecture, and social practices of tuna fishing that act as a bridge between ancient, early modern, and contemporary livelihoods. Through comprehensive digitization, we generate interoperable and parametric models aimed not only at the recording and restoration of objects and spaces, but also – in combination with interviews and archival work – at the valorization and revitalization of traditional practice within contemporary socioeconomic contexts. Through these digital methods, Project ‘U Mari seeks to engage the public with a deeper understanding of historical maritime lifeways using exhibition, virtual environments, and revived traditions. Such an approach can encourage environmentally sound fishing practices that draw on local knowledge and yield local economic benefits and responsible tourism. In this way, the historic and archaeological past offers the opportunity to create a new common language for understanding and communicating the architectural evidence of local traditions, history, and livelihoods in this rich maritime landscape.
Highlights
Diverse places that bring together knowledge related to the life of the sea, the ‘tonnare’—or tuna-fishing and processing installations—of southeast Sicily offer many paths toward understanding the human past
A 3D digitization methodology has been developed for recording underwater sites, topographical contexts and architectural structures related to tuna fishing
Still in its early stages, Project ‘U Mari incorporates a new approach to integrated research, management, representation, and valorization of the complex and varied heritage of Mediterranean maritime life
Summary
Diverse places that bring together knowledge related to the life of the sea, the ‘tonnare’—or tuna-fishing and processing installations—of southeast Sicily offer many paths toward understanding the human past. Through its long historical trajectory, its characteristic techniques and spaces, and its durable social structures, fixed-net tuna fishing— the communal process of the ‘mattanza’—offers a window into the close connections between people, the land, and the sea. By their very nature, the mattanza and tonnare extend beyond the economic and even the social and ecological, into the worlds of ritual and narrative, where the bloody slaughter recalls a sacrifice that reflects the ongoing struggle between fishing practitioners, tuna, and the marine environment. Studies of tonnare comprise a wide range of diverse facets: economic (production, processing, trade and consumption of fish), ethnoanthropological (inventories, tools, diaries of ‘raisi’—the captains of the tuna fleet—and administrators, and for the 20th century, photographic, video and audio documentation), socioreligious (traditions and ritual nature of the mattanza), legal (fishing concessions, rights, regulations, disputes among and within communities), architectural (standing and ruined remains), as well as archaeological and marine biological both
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