Department of Classics and Archaeology

Archaeological Fish Resource

An Arts & Humanities Research Council funded project

Arts and Humanites Research Council

Like cod, archaeological fish specialists are an endangered species and, to halt their population decline, the AHRC funded an initiative to develop a digital resource that would support the training and development of a new generation of fish specialists.

To achieve these aims, the country's main players in zooarchaeological research teamed up to run a series of training workshops for PhD students.

 

Archaeological Fish Resource Workshops

The workshops were held at the Universities of Bradford, Cambridge, Bournemouth and York, and were led by world-leading experts in fish analysis: Andrew Jones, James Barrett, Alison Locker, Shelia Hamilton-Dyer and Rebecca Nicholson. To capture and distil the expertise available at these events, all of the workshops were filmed and the resulting footage was cut together to produce a series of training e-lectures.

Images from the first workshop

 

Alongside the workshops, the project created Fishbone, a digital reference collection. Whilst handling collections will always be the optimal resource for fish analysis, our online reference collection provides high-resolution digital images for key skeletal elements, taken at different views, for more than 90 species of Mediterranean and North Atlantic freshwater and marine fishes.  

Archaeological Fish Resource Team

Director: Naomi Sykes (University of Nottingham)

Researcher: Luke Saddler

Steering committee:

  • James Barrett (University of Cambridge)
  • Sheila Hamilton-Dyer (freelance zooarchaeologist) 
  • Andrew Jones (York Archaeological Trust)
  • Alison Locker (freelance zooarchaeologist) 
  • Rebecca Nicholson (Oxford Archaeology)
  • Rebecca Reynolds (freelance zooarchaeologist)
  • Hannah Russ (University of Bradford)

Partners:

 

 

Department of Classics and Archaeology

University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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