Fish represent a key economic, social and ecological group of species that humans have exploited for tens of thousands of years. However, as many fish stocks are going into decline and with little known about the anthropogenic impacts on the health of the marine ecosystem pre-Industrial Revolution, understanding historical and archaeological exploitation of fish species is key to accurately modelling these changes. Here, we explore the potential of collagen peptide mass fingerprinting (also known as Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry, or ZooMS) for identifying fish remains from the Medieval (fifteenth century) Newport ship wreck (Wales, UK), and in doing so we establish a set of biomarkers we consider useful in discriminating between European fish taxa through the inclusion of over 50 reference taxa. The archaeological results identified nine distinct taxonomic groups, dominated by ling (> 40%), and a substantial amount of cod (> 20%) and hake (~ 20%). The vast majority of samples (> 70%) were identified to species level, and the inability to identify the remaining taxonomic groups with confidence using ZooMS was due to the fact that the reference collection, despite being relatively large in comparison to those presented in mammalian studies, reflects only a small proportion of fish biodiversity from this region. Although the results clearly demonstrate the potential for ZooMS as a means of fish bone identification, the sheer number of different fish species that potentially make up ichthyoarchaeological assemblages leads to obvious requirements for the analysis on much greater numbers of modern reference specimens, or the acquisition of collagen sequences.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2022
Alongside horses, donkeys and their first-generation hybrids represent members of the Equidae family known for their social, economic and symbolic importance in protohistoric and historical France. However, their relative importance and their respective roles in different regions and time periods are difficult to assess based on textual, iconographic and archaeological evidence. This is both due to incomplete, partial and scattered historical sources and difficulties to accurately assign fragmentary archaeological remains at the proper taxonomic level. DNA- based methods, however, allow for a robust identification of the taxonomic status of ancient equine osseous material from minimal sequence data. Here, we leveraged shallow ancient DNA sequencing and the dedicated Zonkey computational pipeline to obtain the first baseline distribution for horses, mules and donkeys in France from the Iron Age to the Modern period. Our collection includes a total of 873 ancient specimens spanning 128 ubiquitous and the most dominant species identified, our dataset reveals the importance of mule breeding during Roman times, especially between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE (Common Era), where they represented between 20.0% and 34.2% of equine assemblages. In contrast, donkeys were almost absent from northern France as-semblages during the whole Roman period, but replaced mules in rural and urban commercial and economic centers from the early Middle Ages. Our work also identified donkeys of exceptional size during Late Antiquity, which calls for a deep reassessment of the true morphological space of past equine species. This study confirmed the general preference toward horses throughout all time periods investigated but revealed dynamic manage-ment strategies leveraging the whole breadth of equine resources in various social, geographic and temporal contexts.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2021