Panel 3.11 – Salt, fish processing and amphorae production across the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium BC. An overview of the technological and economic interactions


Organiser/Chair:

  • Enrique García-Vargas (University of Seville)
  • Francisco José García Fernandez (University of Seville)
  • Antonio Sáez Romero (University of Seville)

External Discussants:

  • Carlos Fabiao (Universidade de Lisboa)
  • Roald Docter (Ghent University)

     

Speakers:

Panel abstract

The processing of fish resources into marketable commodities and the production of transport amphorae for their distribution were economic activities developed in almost all corners of the Mediterranean in early stages of Antiquity, although more widely known for the imperial Roman times. However, for several decades the study of the archaeological evidence connected to the Greek and Phoenician-Punic worlds has made it possible to demonstrate on a material basis what was in principle only an intuition: that these activities played a prominent role in the Mediterranean economies of the 1st millennium BC. Thus, long before Rome became a key power the fish-processing for consumption and its exportation packaged in amphorae was an important factor not only from the perspective of food supply but also linked to the interaction of technological and mercantile spheres between the main socio-cultural Mediterranean areas.

So far, the analysis of ancient fishing, salted-fish and salt production or the manufacture of transport amphorae have been addressed in a compartmentalized way. This has resulted in a lesser amount of attention being paid on the fluid technological and commercial connections that would had taken place between different regions and cultures, particularly significant from the consolidation of the Phoenician and Greek colonization processes in the central and western Mediterranean between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. The main objective is therefore to reconnect these unrelated processes, cultures and regions, and also explore how these technologies were disseminated among the local communities shaken by the phenomenon of colonial expansion and its subsequent development, modifying the systems of production and exchange of foodstuffs from the Atlantic to the Eastern Mediterranean.

This session proposes an integrated discussion of the state of the art on fisheries, salt production, the manufacture of salted fish by-products, amphorae and, in general, ceramic manufacture technologies on the Phoenician-Punic and Greek worlds during the 1st millennium BC. The panel has been conceived as a framework for updating information on typologies, influences, products, quantifying, technological and economic transfers, chaînes opérationnelles, trade routes or even experimental archeology trials. The main goal is to provide an up-to-date overview of these issues for the entire Mediterranean basin, taking into account significant case studies, as well as to reflect on the diachronic evolution of these activities and their structural transformations during the initial phase of expansion of Republican Rome.

Paper abstracts

1. Sónia Gabriel (Direcção Geral do Património Cultural)

Fish and fishing in the Western Mediterranean: species, techniques and trends
The Archaeological record displays interesting information about fish and fishing in the Roman world. Using different sets of evidence, I will discuss fish and fishing in the Western Mediterranean, illustrating how, by and large, they relate to fish-salting industry, dietary fashion and seafood consumption.

 

2. Dimitra Mylona (INSTAP Study Center for East Crete)

Fish and fishing in the Eastern Mediterranean: species, techniques and trends
Fish processing in Mediterranean antiquity was part of a broader fishing system that provided the raw materials to fish salting industry but also had shaped consumers' tastes and ideas about the various types of fish and fish products. This presentation will review the fishing in Eastern Mediterranean in the 1st millenium BC. with emphasis on the exploited species and the fishing techniques used. It will highlight particular features and trends which were crucial for the development and diffusion of fish preservation. Among the issues that will be discussed are the nature of the Eastern Mediterranean fish resources, the types of fishing grounds most commonly exploited and the way fishing technology affected the type and size of catch.

 

3. Enrique Garcia Vargas and Antonio Saez Romero (University of Seville) / Emmanuel Botte (CNRS-AMU, Centre Camille Jullian)

Salt-fish production and trade across the Mediterranean
Since ancient times several areas of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea were outlined because of their fishing wealth and the existence of flourishing businesses based on the manufacture and trade of salted fish by-products, including some cities that reached an international fame (Byzantium, Panormos, Gadir). Great debates have marked the scientific historiography about the origins, diffusion, characteristics and importance of the "industrial fishing” and the consumption of products derived from it (the best known, garum). In spite of the great interest aroused by these questions in the last decades, the origin of this activity, attributed to Greeks and Phoenicians is still far from being fully clarified. In the same way, the discussion about the rise of processed fish production in the first half of the 1st millennium BC remains open (fishing as a sustenance activity?). In the Classical Period salted fish became a luxury food (some categories) and then opened to a wider range of consumers during Hellenism. Other discussions are also active, such as the local or regional recipes for these salted fish and sauces, the supplying for salt, the quantification of the volume of product generated or the relationship of their transport with specific amphorae types. The interest on these issues has so far been uneven, so this paper offers a general overview of the development of "industry" throughout the 1st millennium BC in the Mediterranean area.

 

4. Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen (University of Southern Denmark)

Salt-fish production and trade in Greece and the Black Sea
Salt fish was imported into the Aegean at least as early as the fifth century BC if not before, but to judge from the remains of industrial installations, the apogee of the Pontic salt-fish trade was not reached until the first and or early second century AD. This paper will explore, first, the state of our present knowledge and the evidence upon which it is based; second, the dynamics behind the expansion of the fish processing industry: was it driven by supply (an abundance of fish in the Black Sea) or by demand (rising demand for processed fish in Greece and beyond); third, its socio-economic context: was fish processing a rare example of entrepreneurial capitalism in the ancient world, or embedded in a system of exchange controlled by a landowning elite?

 

5. Maria Teresa Soria Trastoy (Universidad de Cadiz)

Fisheries and salted fish in Ptolemaic Egypt: A state of the art
We present the state of art of fisheries during the Ptolemaic period within the context of the I millennium B.C. and within the geographical space that includes Egypt and the Syrian-Palestinian Corridor, taking into account the data provided by the archaeological record, literary, documentary, linguistic and epigraphic sources, as well as iconographic and ethnographic
sources.
Fishing activities were developed in marine, fluvial, lacustrine and palustrine environmental frameworks. The archaeological record allows us to define part of the fishing tackle and the methods of capture used, although we have a limited number of materials, some decontextualized and others of doubtful chronological adscription (Late to Greco-Roman Period). The technological breakthroughts that take place, the tradition, innovations and variations suffered in them during this period can be recognized thanks to the classification of the methods of capture and typologies of the fishing tackle that we have previously proposed.
The 1st millennium BC is the best documented period of ancient Egypt. Through accounting documents, correspondence and other matters collected in papyri, we can know the organization and regulation fisheries, some of the methods of capture, professional organizations, distribution routes of the products, or their costs.
Capture, regardless of the medium in which it took place, were processed immediately for their preservation and subsequent consumption. Drying is the most common method, though Egypt was well known for its salted fish since Pharaonic times, both dry and wet salted (brine), which was preserved, transported and commercialized, inside and outside Egypt, in ceramic jars and
amphorae. The earliest evidence for the production of freshwater wet-salted fish in the Nile valley comes from Kerma, in the context dated between 800 and 400 B.C. In Pelusium, today Tell Farama, within the industrial area and in the same sector where evidence of purple production was found, are several buckets that could have been part of a saltery complex. In the Red Sea, no evidence has yet been found.

 

6. Enrique Garcia Vargas (University of Seville)

Salt works and tuna traps across the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium BC.
Traditionally, tuna traps and the production of salt have been closely related. The massive capture of tuna in the Atlantic and Mediterranean fisheries must be followed by immediate measures to preserve the product, and historically salt has played a fundamental role in this. The migration routes of the fish, the fisheries and the salt-production areas became, alongside fishermen’s villages, the features of a characteristic, and relatively homogeneous from the technological and economic perspectives, ‘coastal landscape’. Our contribution aims to examine the literary, epigraphical and archaeological record in order to rebuild this landscape diachronically, throughout the 1st millennium BC, between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

 

7. Solène Chevalier (Ecole pratique des hautes études)

Salt, productive activities and land occupation. An overview of the Tyrrhenian archaeological situation at the beginning of the 1st millenium BC.
In 1991, M. Pacciarelli proposed comparing the italian remains of a productive coastal activity with the celtic ateliers de briquetage. Since then, all recurring discoveries in the Central part of the Tyrrhenian Coast are interpreted as indicators of salt fabrics set between the Medium Bronze Age and the Orientalizing Period. A methodical study of the archaeological corpus suggests that these interpretations are not always reliable and that the existence of a mixed activity should be considered further, avoiding parallels with the Celtic workshops. This paper proposes to highlight the local technical expertise of these Italian sites which undergo their decline as metallurgy develops on the Tyrrhenian Coast. This chronological interruption will also be explored and compared with Spanish and French archaeological records. Simultaneously with the rise of metallurgy and the decline of salt a/o mixed littoral activities, the development of harbour sites indicates a coastal and maritime economical mutation during the VII BC. This study of characteristically productive coastal sites includes a wider analysis of settlement modalities between the Bronze Age and the Archaic Time which highlights the central role of these areas and their precocity. The collection of the productive and coastal settlements seems to suggest an organization through geographic sectors which precede the setting up of the city-states territories.

 

8. Edoardo Vanni (University of Siena)

Searching for Salt in Italian Peninsula Mobility and exploitation of Salt from Final Bronze Age to Early Iron Age
The Archaeology of Salt has been considered by then as a strong field of study with specific methodologies and issues, thanks especially to numerous research run in Continental and Atlantic milieu. Regarding the techniques involved in the production of salt in Antiquity it has been already challenged by then the fact that in hot climates, the production of salt was made exclusively by evaporation of water. Conversely the extraction of salt blocks obtained by cooking the salt into boiling pots, well-documented in Continental and Atlantic contexts, has been recorded archaeologically in several Mediterranean sites. In Italy this technique seems to be practiced mainly during the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age especially in Central Coastal Etruria. What are the economic and social premises for the spread of this phenomenon? Is there a correlation with the birth of the major Etruscan centers? Who detain the control of these resources? For what purpose the salt blocks were produced? My assumption is that there is a link between mobility strategies (e.g. transhumance) and salt production in Etruria. First of all salt consumption increased first and foremost to preserved meats and other animal product and it may be necessary to provide addition salt to animal diet. Moreover the salt could have been reduced in blocks to facilitate its transportation for long-distance trade. It is not only a speculation the fact that the shepherds were involved in the production of salt blocks.

 

9. Francisco José García Fernandez and Antonio Sáez Romero (University of Seville)

Amphorae and kiln sites in Southern Iberia Peninsula and northern Mauritania
This is an essential research line for the reconstruction of the regional economy of the 1st millennium BCE, at its peak in the last two decades, but that nevertheless is developed in a very asymmetrical form in the diverse interconnected settlements in the area. On the one hand, since the arrival of the Phoenicians the production of transport amphorae was constant and there is a rich bibliography concerning the typological evolution of the containers and the characteristics and location of the kilns in sites such as the Bay of Cadiz and Malaga's coastline. On the other hand, there are sites or areas with a smaller development of the research, or where arbitrary reasons have resulted in less information about their amphorae forms or pottery production infrastructures (such as the southwest coast of Iberia, the Guadalquivir Valley or Carteia, to cite a few examples). Finally, it is possible to recognize a third set of zones in which the investigation of these issues is still very embryonic, with little information available on the amphorae types or its manufacturing centers (for instance, the rest of the eastern coast of Andalusia, or of the north of present-day Morocco). In any case, it is evident that the production of amphorae was a very widespread and important activity both in the port hubs and in the main river valleys, facilitating trade in many products such as olive oil, wine and especially salted fish.

 

10. Horacio Gonzalez Cesteros and Alfred Galik (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Fish-resources exploitation and commerce in the Aegean in Hellenistic and early Roman times. The case of Ephesus.
Ancient writers relate the richness of western Anatolia in several natural resources. Among them, the exploitation of the sea products seems to be had played a special role since prehistoric times. It is well-known the catch of the big banks of tuna and other migratory fishes in the north part of the eastern Aegean in their way to and from the Black Sea, but fish practices were not only limited to this part of the region and to this kind of fishes. Ephesus provides us some of the best examples of the exploitation of fish and other maritime resources in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but also for the import of fish products from other production regions.
In this presentation we aim to make a multidisciplinary approach to the exploitation and consume of maritime resources from three different case studies. First, the analysis of archaeozoological remains, an archaeological well-stablished discipline in Ephesus. Second, the contribution of material studies, above all amphorae studies, indispensable for the understanding of the arrival of fish products imported from the whole Mediterranean and Black Sea areas. Third, present the evolution of the coastal line and Ephesian coastal landscape for a correct interpretation of the fish exploitation possibilities. Last, for a broader approach is essential to connect the archaeological evidence with the significant epigraphical evidence and numerous literary sources.

 

11. Darío Bernal-Casasola, Ricard Marlasca, Jose M. Vargas and Jose A. Retamosa (Universidad de Cádiz)

Roman fishing strategies in the Western Mediterranean. Sardines, Mackerel and tuna at Gades (Olivillo Project)
In the last decades several models of fishing exploitation in the Western Mediterranean have been proposed, based on documented icthyo-archaeological evidence from fish-salting plants and from markets and consumer contexts. In addition to a perennial local fishery for self-consumption, it has been argued that the industrial fishing of tuna and mackerel, which has been active since the republican era, gradually gave way to catches of smaller fish, especially clupeids, due to the exhaustion or pressure of fishing grounds, mainly from the 3rd c. AD.
Recent archaeological excavations in Gades (El Olivillo project), undertaken by the University of Cadiz, have documented a halieutic Testaccio near the harbour generated as a result of waste discharges from the fishing-canning activity; in which tunas, sardines and mackerels dating back to the Augustan period and the I c. AD appear together in big quantities. Together with other indicators in the Fretum Gaditanum, it is possible to propose a much more complex and varied exploitation strategy, attributing methodological and partly fortuitous questions to the absence of tuna in Late Antiquity and that of sardines at the beginning of the imperial era. And putting on the table the need to have a larger archaeological sample than the currently available, still insufficient, to be able to propose models.

"De las complejas estrategias pesqueras hispanorromanas. Atunes, boquerones, caballas, jureles y sardinas en El olivillo de Gades" (Fulltext)

 

12. Carolina Megale (University of Florence)

The cetaria of Caius Caecina Largus at Populonia
The Roman settlement of Poggio del Molino was built on a strip of land not far from the city of Populonia, the port and the main roads. This strategic location (with different purposes at different times) has made Poggio del Molino a multilayered site, continuously inhabited from late Republican times to the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Before becoming a maritime villa, in the Augustan age the complex was used as a farm, with an area for the production of fish sauce; the farm was built on top of a late Republican structure displaying with the features of a defensive building.
The Augustan fish-sauce factory consisted of at least ten salting vats, eight of which are square in shape. They are lined in pairs across from alongside another rectangular vat, larger in size and depth.
The discovery - inside a hypogeum room which was abandoned at the time - of a betica amphora with titulo picto indicating the recipient of the container, gives us the name of the owner of the farm and the fish sauce factory: Caio Caecina Largo, of the gens Caecina, from the Etruscan city of Volterra.
The discovery of the amphora with the name of the owner and the research at the cetaria in Poggio del Molino provide a significant contribution to our knowledge of one of the major economic activities in the territory of Populonia in the early imperial age.

 

13. Rafael M. Rodríguez and Diego Piay Augusto (Pontevedra County Council)

New consumption in the Northwest Hispanic from the anphoric remains located in indigenous contexts of the Rías Baixas, 1st millennium BC
During the excavations promoted by Pontevedra Provincial Council during the years 2015, 2016 and 2017 in several sites of the Rías Baixas, an important volume of amphoric remains was documented that allow an approach to the introduction of new foods and new guidelines of food consumption from the fourth century BC.
In the present study, an analysis of the amphoric typologies documented in archaeological sites dating from the first millennium BC will be carried out, after which conclusions will be drawn on the eating habits of the peninsular northwest, based on the known data for these amphorae.

 

14. Darío Bernal-Casasola (Universidad de Cádiz)

The transition to the Roman Era. Salt-fish and amphorae production and trade in the Mediterranean during the 2nd-1st centuries BC.
Closing the panel "Salt, fish processing and amphorae production across the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium BC. An overview of the technological and economic interactions", some ideas and recent working topics between II - I c. BC will be presented, in order to stimulate the interdisciplinary and to discuss research lines for the next future. The technological Roman innovations will be highlighted, as well as the new archeological evidente in the last decade or archaeological work, mainly focused in Hispania.