Reconstructing Fish Harvesting across Three Centuries in the Chesapeake Bay Area

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The relevant historical and documentary sources demonstrate the significance that seafood plays in the lives of people from the Chesapeake Bay area, both as an economic industry and as shaping culinary identity. The Chesapeake Bay Watershed is North America's largest estuary, occupied by a wide variety of aquatic and non-aquatic fauna. Even with this significance, the archaeological literature on fish remains from the Chesapeake Bay is limited and tends to focus on earlier periods in history. In this poster, we use zooarchaeological data from fish remains collected from a variety of sites in Maryland and Virginia, most of which span the 18th, 19th, and early-20th centuries, to explore this research gap. Through this analysis we are able to reconstruct trends in fish supply, demonstrate the relevancy of historical sources, visualize the spatial distribution of fish remains, while also showing how archaeological fish are useful in connecting past human activities to the local estuarine ecology in both direct and indirect ways. In addition to exploring how fish were harvested in the past and how these activities connect to modern harvesting techniques, we also highlight potential avenues for future research in this region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53098