Fishing through time

Presents the system archetypes that were present in the paper " Fishing For the Future".

2015

Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2022

2010

The Inland seas. Towards an Ecohistory of the Mediterranean adn teh Black Sea, 2016

Conclusions In the study of the past exploitation of marine resources, two major questions arise: what was available to the fishermen and what did they choose to capture? Occasionally, the distinction between the two is blurred and availability is viewed as the principal factor defining the range and quantity of marine foods that people consumed. In areas of high physical and cultural variability, as, for example, the Aegean Sea, such simplifications often lead to misleading interpretations. This paper has examined the relation between humans and marine resources in three chronological periods: the Mesolithic, roughly nine millennia ago; the Bronze Age, especially the second half of the second millennium BC; and the Classical and Hellenistic periods, covering the fifth to the second century BC. This review has highlighted certain issues which are crucial to our understanding of the way humans have interacted with the sea over time. The first issue is that the ability of archaeology and history to illuminate this past relationship is strongly dependent on two factors: the quality and resolution of the available data and the approach taken with regards to these data. It is characteristic of this field of research that the greater the distance in time, the greater the dominance of ideas derived from environmental determinism, which equate availability with exploitation, with only technology intervening between the two. For the Aegean Bronze Age, with academic interest dominated by a focus on the rise of complex societies and palaces, the exploitation of marine resources has generally been considered a peripheral issue, mostly viewed in relation to diet and subsistence. Again, as for earlier periods, palaeo-economic models have dominated the discussion. For more recent times, such as the Classical and Hellenistic periods, the research focus has been different, with consideration of the written record and the discourse around consumption rather than just the actual materiality of the marine exploitation itself. In recent years, however, the situation has changed, with a plurality of approaches being pursued. This change is obviously related to epistemological developments but also to the increase in the quantity of available data. The multitude of uses and meanings of marine resources in the Bronze Age southern Aegean, for example, has become evident and better documented by a new wave of excavations that focus on coastal sites and apply field methods that promote the retrieval of relevant data. The wealth and variety of the data produced by current research and the increased emphasis on the contextualisation of these data offer an important benefit. Questions and issues that were previously considered approachable only through the written record (e.g., taste, symbolism, food taboos) can now be considered for periods without written records. This could potentially lead to better integration of the archaeological and historical narratives, and thus to a better understanding of the relation between people and the sea in the short-term and the long-term. The second issue highlighted by the short reviews of the data in this paper is that to understand the way ancient people interacted with the Aegean, we need to appreciate the intricacies and endless possibilities offered by the many levels of variability that are observed in the area. Environmental and ecological variability is pronounced in the Aegean, as is cultural variability, expressed archaeologically and historically in the variety technological and artistic traditions, the highly-fragmented political organisation and the many subcultures supported by this patchwork. These levels of variability gave rise to a multitude of human responses to the sea and its resources. As a result, any diachronic review or any history of the relationship between people and the sea will be more accurate if presented not as a single, linear narrative, but more like a piece of orchestral music in which different instruments and sounds follow their own individual rhythm, with continuities and disruptions, in parallel or in collision with others, synchronous or diverging, but ultimately producing a rich, multi-level outcome.

Journal of Social Archaeology, 2003

Reading this article is to embark on an adventure through certain ethnographic and archaeological texts about a specific form of boat construction. The voyage sets out from the village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia where whaling boats continue to be built according to traditions passed on by the ancestors. However, while researchers write about boats, they simultaneously board the boats in order to construct the sequence of their narratives. Whether they journey back through the eastern archipelagos in search of the origin of a boat’s design; or follow the plank by plank construction sequence; or whether they find a leak in previous boat building discourse – all are involved in intricate relations of becoming through the materiality of the very boats they desire to observe and describe. Narratives are premised on unquestioned notions of linear time and travel. In this article, however, readers find themselves carried along on a different voyage, where time and travel are always in the here and now.

2011

Sustainability

Human health and livelihoods are threatened by declining marine fisheries catches, causing substantial interest in the sources and dynamics of fishing. Catch analyses in individual exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and the high seas are abundant, and research across multiple EEZs is growing. However, no previous studies have systematically compared catches, intranational versus international fish flows, and fishing nations within all of the world’s EEZs and across adjacent and distant EEZs and the high seas to inform “metacoupled” fisheries management. We use the metacoupling framework—a new approach for evaluating human–nature interactions within and across adjacent and distant systems (metacouplings)—to illustrate how fisheries catches were locally, regionally, and globally interconnected in 1950–2014, totaling 5.8 billion metric tons and increasing by 298% (tonnage) and 431% (monetary value) over this time period. Catches by nations in their own EEZs (largest in Peru) and adjacent ...

Post Classical Archaeologies, 2024

L’articolo prende spunto da due recenti ipotesi. La prima, formulata da C. Parisi Presicce, presenta il colosso della basilica di Massenzio come una rilavorazione della statua di Giove del Tempio del Campidoglio. La seconda, di C. Vollmer, propone di interpretare la rotonda al fianco sud di San Pietro, poi dedicata a Sant’Andrea, come l’edificio nel quale l’augusto avrebbe progettato di farsi seppellire ad Petrum. Se confermate, queste ipotesi impongono una revisione del diffuso schema storiografico che oppone il disinteresse quasi totale di Costantino per il centro di Roma all’ambizioso programma di fondazioni ecclesiastiche extra moenia. Il saggio discute queste ipotesi inserendole nella più ampia problematica del rapporto tra Costantino e la Roma antica, aprendo nuove piste per affrontare in chiave transdisciplinare le dinamiche della trasformazione del mondo tardoantico.