Fish out of water

Sometimes the archaeological record preserves deposits representing time-averaged, successive episodes of activity, such as cumulative palimpsests, and sometimes, it captures a temporally discrete moment or event (Bailey, 2007). In this issue, Wouters et al. (2023) present a fascinating zooarchaeological example of the latter from an early modern urban context in Antwerp, Belgium.

A monumental refortification of Antwerp, including rampart construction between AD 1542 and 1553, at one location directly overlay and preserved a shallow depression containing thousands of complete fish. The depression containing the fish remains was relatively small, probably measuring little more than 1 m in length and breadth, with the layer containing most of the fish being only 2 cm thick. That these bones were found in anatomical alignment indicates relatively minimal post-depositional disturbance.

Wouters and colleagues explore demographic, taphonomic and contextual evidence to tease out the likely origin of this deposit. As they demonstrate, the zooarchaeological assemblage contains material that arrived via different taphonomic pathways. While a minority of the material can be considered to be human food waste, the majority of the material represents freshwater fish still in anatomical connection, sometimes with skin and scales visible. Most of the approximately 3500 individuals (>95%) are from the cyprinid family, with white bream and roach being the most common taxa. It is also notable that most of the fish are small individuals—their size indicates ages at the end of the first growth season, with deaths occurring during winter. The authors argue that this is a natural death assemblage, one representing ‘catastrophic’ mortality of a local population. With catastrophic mortality being used to describe the simultaneous deaths of all living individuals in a local population, therefore capturing a ‘snapshot’ of that population (Gifford-Gonzalez, 2018; Lyman, 1994).

Of the different scenarios considered by the authors, they favour a natural rather than an anthropogenic cause. The find context sits some 7.2 m above sea level, and the authors hypothesize that a massive flooding event would likely explain how the fish ended up at this high level. Indeed, historical sources attest to the occurrence of such winter floods occurring occasionally in the period just prior to the construction of the city walls. Wouters and colleagues propose that following the flooding event, the waterbody that broke into the inner city would have gradually shrunk, leaving a concentration of fish and eventually causing mortality due to lack of oxygen or the low winter temperatures. Both in its context and its population, these fish represent an unusual assemblage. The archaeological record is rich in animal bone assemblages representing discarded food waste; it is much rarer to find such direct snapshots of natural animal populations.

There are no conflicts of interest.