The Impact of Fishing and Transportation Technologies on Nineteenth-Century Fisheries and Fish Supply in New Orleans, Louisiana

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper examines fish supply in late nineteenth-century New Orleans to understand how new fishing and transportation technologies transformed fish trade networks in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Previous research has demonstrated temporal and geographic shifts in the city’s fish supply, and we extend this work to late-nineteenth-century contexts using zooarchaeological, ancient DNA, and stable isotope analyses. The identified species demonstrate rapid and extensive incorporation of multiple nonlocal fishes, especially snappers (family Luthjanidae), beginning in the 1860s. Although the relative abundance of these fishes in nineteenth-century New Orleans can be explained by rising urban populations and increased demand, this trade must also be understood as being enabled by the development and widespread adoption of new technologies including longline fishing equipment, railroad transport, and artificial ice production. These technologies not only allowed for the long-distance shipment of fresh fish at relatively low cost, they also underpinned the development of successive new fisheries such as those targeting Northern Red Snapper in Florida and White Hake in the northwest Atlantic Ocean. Ultimately, we argue that late-nineteenth-century transportation technologies revolutionized the trade of fresh fish by enabling shipment of these commodities across continental and transnational scales in ways not previously possible.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39649.0