Identifying and understanding fishing activities during the Late Pleistocene

Late Pleistocene fish remains have been recovered from many cave sites across Europe. This research focuses on two areas 1) Cantabria, northern Spain (a coastal area), and 2) the Fucino Basin, central Italy (a mountainous area). Fish bone assemblages from sites in both areas are dominated by anadromous and non-anadromous salmonid species. Material from sites in these two regions can be reliably attributed to human deposition, as such, they can be used to establish and compare fishing strategies. Analyses included: species identification, size estimation, spatial distribution, element representation and seasonality. Although in both areas there are sites yielding many and few fish remains, there is a greater reliance on fish as a dietary resource in the Fucino Basin. This was not expected; the Cantabrian sites have artefactual evidence for fishing – including harpoons and gouges, that are absent from the Fucino sites. There are also differences in the element representation patterns; Cantabrian sites yielded abundant vertebrae, while Fucino sites more frequently yielded a high proportion of cranial remains. Evidence from Cantabria and the Fucino Basin suggests that human fishing behaviour in these two regions were very different during the Upper Palaeolithic, these differences are interpreted in terms of hunter-gatherer subsistence behaviour.