Evaluating Mass Capture Fishing Techniques

Summary

The term "mass capture" is widely used in archaeological and zooarchaeological discourse to connote any form of fish capture besides active, individual procurement of a single fish such as hook and line or spear fishing. Unfortunately, this blanket term obscures the diversity and range of mass capture techniques and other critical factors that have implications for archaeological and anthropological interpretation such as materials, technology, ecology, and labor, among other variables. To begin to address this issue a series of experiments were undertaken involving one particular type of mass capture—fish weirs. Long shore and tidal weirs were modeled based on archaeological data from fish weirs in the Eastern United States. This poster details the preliminary results of this study via the quantification of fish species captured per weir configuration, juxtaposed against baseline fisheries monitoring data from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Variation between the weirs exists primarily in terms of labor invested in weir construction and behavioral patterns of fish species caught. These results show the need for considering particular types of mass capture fishing when addressing ichthyological remains at archaeological sites. All research presented herein was conducted at the Seahorse Key Marine Laboratory, Gulf Coast, Florida.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage