Archaeological Fish Resource
An Arts & Humanities Research Council funded project
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)