Haddock in European Prehistory

A few weeks ago I presented a poster about haddock fishing in European Prehistory. It was a poster at the Kiel "Creation of Landscapes V" conference. I've put this poster on academia here: 

https://www.academia.edu/32088118/A_Billion_Blistering_Barnacles_Haddock_fishing_in_European_prehistory

This side project emerged out of the results of our study of the Late Neolithic Mienakker excavation, a few years ago. Here our zoologists, Jörn Zeiler and Dick Brinkhuizen, identified lots of haddock bones, unique to the Netherlands, it seemed.. They were not the first to show this for this site, Bob Beerenhout already published about it, but because now we analysed the rest of the site, we could put this find into context. So following up on this, I started to collect haddock finds from all over Europe, to see whether 'our site' is really so "unique" as we said it was. And apparently it is still a pretty unique settlement!

As the fish expert of our research group, Dick Brinkhuizen, died in 2016, I decided to honour him by dedicating this poster..

In the meantime after producing the poster, I've found some more sites. These are now added to my database. That also meant I needed to make updated maps of all sites that have haddock bone remains...

First map shows the sites that have haddock per country. Notice the abundance of sites in Britain, and the absence from the "long stretch" in Norway...

Second map shows all the sites where haddock was found, but now in green are all the sites that were present on the poster. Red ones are the newly added sites, and grey dots are sites where I only know about the presence of haddock, not about the amount of remains (v or + or something similar was published). If anyone knows anything more about these 8 sites, I'm all ears! The sites are:

Scotland	Fiskary Bay
Scotland	Morton
Sweden	Dammen
Sweden	Dafter
Sweden	Ånneröd
Denmark	Maglemosegard
Scotland	Buckquoy phase 3/5
England	London 1-7 St Thomas street

The third and final map shows some general periodisation. Interesting is the oldest site, being Upper Palaeolithic and from Spain. Apparently it was pretty cold back then, during the Last Glacial Maximum. And even more interestingly, this implies that also these Solutréan communities caught seafish, possibly at depth.. While the already mentioned poster focused on the prehistoric sites, I've now also included Viking and later assemblages. The Icelandic sites come with the story of cultural preference: apparently people preferred haddock over cod in their cuisine :) who knew!

These three maps don't say anything about the abundance or importance of this specific fish species, but for that you can read the poster!

If people have more sites with haddock, or know more about the sites for which I don't have quantitative data yet, feel free to e-mail/tweet/etc. me!! :)


















ps. when you note the legend, you'll see how I name my files..

pps. Haddock, Schelvis, Schellfisch, Kolja, Kuller, Hyse, Eglefin, Plamiak, Eglefino, Eglefim, or more generally known as Melanogrammus Aeglefinus!