Internet Archaeology 37: Human Exploitation of Aquatic Landscapes

The daily lives of Achill Island's inhabitants were heavily influenced by their relationships with the ocean, its resources and the seasons. Ireland's largest island, situated along its predominantly rural western coast, Achill remains in many ways idyllic and pastoral, descriptors used in the modern and recent historic era to draw tourists but also used in previous centuries to denigrate the culture and lifeways of the islands' inhabitants. Achill Island's maritime landscape, including its shoreline and coastal resources, was one of contest during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The island and its surrounding waters formed an active landscape within which the island's population resisted government control by maintaining, as much as possible and in some cases against government order, their preferred relationships with the ocean and its resources. Methods developed by the islanders for boatbuilding, natural resource exploitation, agriculture, labour, and travel related directly to the maritime landscape; these practices also relied on familial and extra-familial groups that provided community cohesion and a support network that allowed for cultural resilience. Achill's residents structured agricultural, labour and maritime practices according to seasonal cycles and traditional practice, often not in the manner preferred by landlords and government bodies charged with improving rural living standards. Archaeological, archival and ethnographic evidence shows that the islanders' practices, uniquely adapted to the maritime and terrestrial conditions of Achill, were in many ways better suited both to their daily lives and their surrounding environment than those imposed by external agents.The authors encourage the reader to explore the interactive map of Achill for a tour and visuals of the island to put this article into context.

This article presents evidence for over 4200 prehistoric shell midden sites distributed on opposite sides of the southern Red Sea. These sites were primarily discovered using survey methods and site location models developed for locating shell midden sites on the Farasan Islands, where over 3000 have been found during previous research. These sites have been extensively excavated in the field and dated. Combining predictive models with remote sensing, an additional 1200 sites have been detected on the opposite side of the Red Sea, centred on the Dahlak Islands in Eritrea. Before these discoveries on the Farasan and Dahlak Archipelagos, the number of published prehistoric shell midden sites in the southern Red Sea was less than twenty. Combined, these sites represent a significant addition to the prehistoric coastal archaeology of the region. These new shell midden sites, and their apparent similarities on the two opposing coastlines, may indicate evidence of cultural contacts across the Red Sea during the Holocene Red Sea.

This article explores the economic significance of marine resources in the south-western Baltic Sea during the transition to agriculture. Faunal remains are used in order to explain subsistence patterns, including preferred prey, exploitation of specific ecozones, hunting methods and techniques, butchering and dietary patterns. Seasonality can be linked to specific economic advantages that result from natural faunal abundances and not selective hunting. The importance of marine resources remains steady during the transition to agriculture, as shown by residue analysis on ceramic vessels from the same archaeological context as well as by faunal abundance.

The Ertebølle culture is a late Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher culture in southern Scandinavia, northern Germany and Poland. Archaeological finds as well as scientific analyses of humans and their artefacts indicate the great importance of aquatic resources, both marine and freshwater, to Ertebølle subsistence.In northern Germany, modern freshwater fish samples can have very high apparent radiocarbon ages (up to 3000 years). If such dramatic 'freshwater reservoir effects' also existed during the late Mesolithic, they could lead to artificially old radiocarbon dates for the bones of Ertebølle humans and domestic dogs, and for carbonised food crusts on cooking pots. Conversely, if we can demonstrate radiocarbon age 'offsets' in such samples, we can often attribute them to the exploitation of freshwater food resources.This article discusses methods of identifying freshwater resources in prehistoric pottery, including radiocarbon reservoir effects. We consider the results of radiocarbon, stable isotope and elemental analyses of food crusts on prehistoric pottery from four sites in the Alster and Trave valleys: Kayhude, Schlamersdorf, Bebensee and Seedorf.

Historical and archaeological records of consumption practices indicate that people living along the Swahili coast relied largely on fish for subsistence; however, little research has been done to explore how aquatic subsistence strategies varied among different settlements in the region, both spatially and chronologically. Such questions are particularly interesting, as the communities were largely urban, and relied on fish for the bulk of their protein consumption.We compared evidence of subsistence strategies and exploited fish habitats in two Swahili regions that represent different maritime landscapes. Because particular fish species generally inhabit different sections of the marine environment, the composition of these species at each site can be used to estimate the variable exploitation of these habitats. Overall, the analysed samples showed a heavy exploitation of fish found around coral reefs, but with varying proportions of other exploited habitats, such as estuary, mangrove, sandy/muddy, and outer reef zones. The general pattern indicates that samples from offshore islands have higher representations of fish from coral/rocky habitats while samples from near-shore islands show a lower reliance on coral species. Over time there is an increase at certain sites in the exploitation of oceanic and pelagic fish that coincides with the more frequent consumption of domesticated bovids. We discuss the historical and environmental implications of these variable patterns of aquatic subsistence strategies along the East African coastline, and propose that there is a close link between their ability to exploit these marine resources, their success as urban settlements, and the development of feasting rituals.