Summer reading lists are ubiquitous, but one title not likely bandied about on the mass media circuit is California Maritime Archaeology: A San Clemente Island Perspective. It caught my eye because of my own archaeological focus on fish and fishing in the eastern Mediterranean. What’s that got to do with islands off southern California’s coast? Well, lots. And, just so you know both coasts are covered, I keep a lookout for publications about maritime exploitation by cultures in the Gulf of Maine as well.

While Heather Pringle, who usually writes this blog, is on assignment in the Andes, I’ll be in Brooklyn, trying to tie up loose ends on the publication of the fish remains from Franchthi Cave in southern Greece. Excavated a couple decades back by Thomas Jacobsen of Indiana University, Franchthi has an amazing sequence, spanning the millennia from end of the Paleolithic through the Neolithic about 5,000 years ago. Although there are a few gaps in this sequence, the deposits were extensively water-sieved, meaning we have a very full account of the biological remains, including fish.

The earliest remains reflect a brackish-water environment, with gray mullet, sea bream, and eels. But there’s a huge change in the Upper Mesolithic, to full marine fish and, most exciting, large bluefin tuna. At a time when the inhabitants of the cave topped out at just about 5 feet, some inches, they were catching tuna as big as they were. Hence my interest in fishing off southern California and in the Gulf of Maine, both places where large, top-line predators were being caught. California Maritime Archaeology has a chapter devoted to “The Dolphin Hunters,” and in Maine, the Native Americans were catching swordfish.

I’m in awe of the early fishers of California, Maine, and Franchthi. For the last, I am their spokesman. The magnificent bluefin they caught are now reduced to numbers in a database and a slice in a pie chart, but what struggles are represented by these bones? Bluefin of the size caught in the Mesolithic at Franchthi are not now—and never will be—found in the Aegean again. We’ve eaten them all. I suspect my colleagues in southern California and in Maine have similar data. Even later, with smaller coastal fish such as sea bream, the data from Franchthi show a decrease in the size of fish caught—a harbinger of today’s over-exploitation. Sadly, having decimating the large ones, we are moving on to eating smaller fish.

The Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic fisheries of sites like Franchthi are long gone. It is up to Aegean archaeologists, and in other areas their colleagues in southern California and Maine, to testify to the lost relationship between the people and the sea. Today, what can you or I do? Personally, I avoid eating any top-level predators, from tuna to swordfish. You can argue that U.S. based fisheries are responsible regarding such species, but the fish don’t stay in U.S. waters. Of other species, some are obvious “no-goes” like Chilean sea bass or cod. Have a look at www.seafoodwatch.org, part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s website, where you can print out a pocket guide of what’s okay to eat at your favorite restaurant or sushi bar, or what’s best left alone. We can’t recover what is lost, but maybe we can stop the bleeding.

This entry was posted by Mark Rose on Thursday, July 16, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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