Fish Processing in Italy and Sicily During Antiquity Emmanuel Botte To cite this version: Emmanuel Botte. Fish Processing in Italy and Sicily During Antiquity. Journal of Maritime Archae- ology, Springer Verlag (Germany), 2018, 13 (3), pp.377-387. hal-01944327 HAL Id: hal-01944327 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01944327 Submitted on 12 Dec 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Fish Processing in Italy and Sicily During Antiquity Emmanuel Botte Journal of Maritime Archaeology ISSN 1557-2285 Volume 13 Number 3 J Mari Arch (2018) 13:377-387 DOI 10.1007/s11457-018-9214-2 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self- archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Journal of Maritime Archaeology (2018) 13:377–387 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-018-9214-2 ORIGINAL PAPER Fish Processing in Italy and Sicily During Antiquity Emmanuel Botte1 Published online: 15 November 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract The aim of this paper is to present a short overview of the production and trade in marine resources in Italy and Sicily during Antiquity. As the results of this research have already been published in detail elsewhere, the aim of this short contribution is to summarise the most important data and to highlight some of the research questions that remain unsolved. The paper follows a chronological order, from the pre-Roman period to the 2nd century AD, as well as a geographical one, starting with Sicily, moving on to Magna Grecia in what is now southern Italy and then moving on to the rest of Italy. A major consideration, highlighted here, is that in many cases we are dealing with data from old excavations and precise archaeological information is rarely available. Keywords Salting vats · Amphorae · Salted fsh · Sicily · Magna Grecia · Italy State of the Current Research on the Pre‑Roman Period in Sicily1 There is archaeological evidence for a minimum of six fsh-salting factories in Sicily dat- ing from the period prior to the defeat of the Carthaginian feet against the Romans, at the end of the First Punic War in the 3rd century BC (Fig. 1). They are mainly concentrated in two areas, on the north-western and on the south-eastern coast of the island, both areas with high fshing potential, where local fshing traditions developed. Indeed, these tradi- tions never really stopped; Sicily was well known for its fshing at least until the middle of the 20th century. The particular signifcance of these installations lies in the fact that they are located on the two sides of the island which were culturally and politically diferent before the Roman conquest, the western part being under Punic infuence while the eastern part was under Greek rule. It is particularly interesting to note that the fsh salting factories difer in their spatial organization even though they functioned within the same chronological time- frame, originating in the 4th century BC. 1 The following discussion is presented in detail in Botte (2009), where an extensive bibliography can be found. Here bibliographic references are only indicative, aiming to emphasise certain topics, or they refer to publications that appeared after 2009. * Emmanuel Botte [email protected]‑aix.fr 1 Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, CCJ, Aix‑en‑Provence, France Vol.:(0123456789)1 3 Author's personal copy 378 Journal of Maritime Archaeology (2018) 13:377–387 Fig. 1 Maps of sites in Sicily mentioned in the text (© Botte) The main diference between the two areas with regard to the salting installations is that the Punic factories have quadrangular vats, as can be seen at San Vito lo Capo (Fig. 2) or at Isola delle Femmine, while the Greek ones are circular in plan, with a truncated section, as can be seen at Vendicari and Portopalo (Fig. 3). All the Punic factories that have been identifed so far in the Mediterranean have quadrangular vats, with the notable exception of the earliest installations in Gadir (Bay of Cádiz) dating from the 5th century AD. It would appear that in the context of fsh processing, circular vats are a specifcally Greek feature.2 For this to be confrmed, they would need to be compared with those from other Greek fac- tories but so far, apart from the Sicilian examples, none have been discovered. Apart from the vats, the presence of transport amphorae is a major marker for the pro- duction of processed fsh products. Certain types of Punic amphorae are well-known for this specialised use, since there has been a considerable amount of research on this topic, some in recent years (Bechtold 2011; for a general overview of the Punic amphorae pro- duction see Ramon-Torres 1995). The same cannot be said for similar containers used on the Greek side of Sicily. One has to wonder why?3 Perhaps the level of production was not sufcient or signifcant enough to provide salted fsh beyond what was needed to satisfy local demand, for which Syracuse must have been the main destination. It is possible that for those products destined for local markets, for example at Syracuse, non-ceramic con- tainers such as baskets were used. These would leave no archaeological trace. For more distant trade, some other type of containers would be needed. We could hypothesise that 2 For more details on this hypothesis see Botte (2016). 3 It can be noted that Greek Sicily is not the only area where specialised containers for the trade of pro- cessed fsh appear to be missing. See Bekker-Nielsen (2016) for the Black Sea; Lytle this volume for trade of Pontic fsh in the Aegean in containers that are invisible archaeologically. 1 3 Author's personal copy Journal of Maritime Archaeology (2018) 13:377–387 379 Fig. 2 San Vito Lo Capo factory plan (Botte 2009: fg. 3–13) Fig. 3 Vendicari factory plan (Basile 1992: fg. 4) 1 3 Author's personal copy 380 Journal of Maritime Archaeology (2018) 13:377–387 there was a locally produced imitation of the Punic repertoire, thus rendering these local vessels virtually invisible on morphological grounds. Petrographic analysis, undertaken on several examples of these types of amphorae, showed that they were produced in the West- ern part of the island. It is possible that a specifc Greek amphora type was dedicated to the trade of fsh products, but so far we have no evidence for that since no Greek amphorae carrying fsh have been identifed, even in shipwrecks. Did the producers put their product in Punic amphorae? If that was the case, it would mean frstly, that they did not consider their product important enough to require a specifc container and secondly, that it would be impossible to demonstrate archaeologically. Finally, it is possible that containers other than amphorae were put to this use: coarse ware such as stamnoi or larger ceramic con- tainers such as pithoi might be suitable. However, at present it is not possible to provide a defnitive solution to the diferent hypotheses suggested here. Reading this synthesis on Pre-Roman Sicily, the reader may be surprised to see that almost nothing has been said about Magna Graecia. Although some ancient sources men- tion salted fsh from this area, for example there is a quote by Euthydemus of Athens (ap. Ath, III, 116c) evoking the salted tuna of Tarentum transported in stamnoi, we do not have any archaeological evidence of a factory from this period. This is really all the more unfor- tunate because this being an area of Greek cultural infuence, we could expect to fnd the circular vats that I have suggested were a specifc feature of the Greek installations. Let us hope that future discoveries will improve our current state of knowledge and lead to prom- ising advances in the feld. Production in Roman Sicily Several factories were built, reorganised or extended after the island passed under Roman domination. This is the case for the installations at Milazzo, Capo Pachino, Vendicari and Portopalo, but the best example is the complex of Cala Minnola on Levanzo island, west of Trapani. The Egadi islands, besides being part of a strategic archipelago during the First Punic War (Tusa and Royal 2012), were a perfect spot for tuna fshing and remained so until the middle of the 20th century.4 The site of Cala Minnola was discovered by a tourist in 1976, F. Bergonzoni, who published his fnd in the review Antiqua (Bergonzoni 1977), but the site was never really excavated and documented until 2014 (Botte et al.