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Abstract
The role and significance of fish and fishing in the ancient Near East has been little studied. A new assemblage of fish remains and fishing gear recovered from Bronze Age Bet Yerah on the Sea of Galilee, however, offers insights into the transition from village to town life, and illuminates interactions between local populations and incoming groups. The assemblage also reveals temporal and spatial variations in the utilisation of local fish resources. As the first such assemblage obtained from a systematically sampled Early Bronze Age stratigraphic sequence in the Southern Levant, it highlights the contribution of secondary food-production and -consumption activities to the interpretation of socio-cultural change.
Highlights
Despite the location of many archaeological sites along the rivers and streams and on the coastlines and freshwater lakes of Western Asia, fish and fishing have rarely featured in studies of ancient Near Eastern food economies
Assemblage of freshwater fish bones and fishing gear recovered during recent excavations at the Early Bronze Age site of Tel Bet Yerah (Kh. el-Kerak), on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee, offers an initial means with which to address this long-overlooked subject
We argue that striking changes in fishing practices and fish consumption combine with other components in the material assemblage of Early Bronze Age Bet Yerah to reflect the profound impact on task-scapes and sense-scapes of the transition from village to town life in Early Bronze I and II (c. 3200–3000 BC), and to illustrate a mode of cultural negotiation between local and incoming migrant groups in the first half of Early Bronze III (c. 2850–2700 BC)
Summary
Despite the location of many archaeological sites along the rivers and streams and on the coastlines and freshwater lakes of Western Asia, fish and fishing have rarely featured in studies of ancient Near Eastern food economies. Fishing hooks would probably have been used for targeting catfish, as they are more apt to bite than other species Unusual as they are, the appearance of hooks and line in the Bet Yerah plaza supports the possibility that the Early Bronze III Khirbet Kerak Ware-using newcomers were unacquainted with the use of nets for fishing in open water. The appearance of hooks and line in the Bet Yerah plaza supports the possibility that the Early Bronze III Khirbet Kerak Ware-using newcomers were unacquainted with the use of nets for fishing in open water Instead, they preferred to fashion fishing hooks of different sizes and to target catfish, with which they would have been familiar from the rivers and streams in their presumed regions of origin. Fish are notably absent in the rich corpus of Kura-Araxes zoomorphic iconography (Sagona 1984)
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