[Sca-cooks] fish consumption

[Ides Boone]

Hello Terry,

Most of the faunal material comes from latrines (cess-pits). We
systematically sieved with meshes of 4 mm, 2 mm and 1 mm. Also sometimes
fish bones were recovered in the hand collected material. Namur (Belgium
) is situated on the confluence of the rivers Meuse and Sambre, and thus
freshwater fish is easily available. If we compare the proportion of
fish with that of non-fish (mammals and birds, we see that they ate
quite a lot of fish. This was mostly because of the food rules, I think.
Many days were days of abstinence (wednesday,friday, 40 days, etc.) were
days were no one was allowed to ate meat.

I am working on an article about social differentiation? i. e. how can
animal bones tell us something of the social status of the people that
deposited these bones, so I am also very much interested in relative
prices of the fish. I can imagine pike, sturgeon etc. was very expensive
but what about the other ones.

Best wishes, Ides




Terry Decker wrote:
>
> Fishmongers middens, kitchen middens or latrines?  It occurs to me that the
> 10-15 centimeter (I believe that is what was meant by the sm) are large
> enough to be trash fish from seining or are small enough to be eaten whole.
>
> I'm a little pressed for time, so let me get back with you over the next
> couple of days.  This appears to be a fascinating piece of culinary history.
>
> Bear
>
> >I am working as an archaeozoologist in Belgium. I had to study sieved
> >samples with faunal material from Medieval and Post-Medieval sites from
> >Namur (Belgium). This material consists mainly of freshwater fish and a
> >low proportion of marine fish. Some of the fresh water fish that I
> >identified aren't very popular nowadays.
> >
> >Ides (Belgium)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sca-cooks mailing list
> Sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
> http://www.ansteorra.org/mailman/listinfo/sca-cooks