Supplementary material from "The prelude to industrial whaling: identifying the targets of ancient European whaling using Zooarchaeology and collagen mass-peptide fingerprinting"
Posted on 2023-09-06 - 16:58
Taxonomic identification of whale bones found during archaeological excavations is problematic due to their typically fragmented state. This difficulty limits understanding of both the past spatio-temporal distributions of whale populations and of possible early whaling activities. To overcome this challenge, we performed Zooarchaeology by Mass-Spectrometry on an unprecedented 719 archaeological and palaeontological specimens of probable whale bone from Atlantic European contexts, predominantly dating from ca 3500 BCE to the eighteenth century CE. The results show high numbers of Balaenidae (many likely North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis)) and grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus) specimens, two taxa no longer present in the eastern North Atlantic. This discovery matches expectations regarding the past utilization of North Atlantic right whales, but was unanticipated for grey whales, which have hitherto rarely been identified in the European zooarchaeological record. Many of these specimens derive from contexts associated with mediaeval cultures frequently linked to whaling: the Basques, northern Spaniards, Normans, Flemish, Frisians, Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. This association raises the likelihood that early whaling impacted these taxa, contributing to their extirpation and extinction. Much lower numbers of other large cetacean taxa were identified, suggesting that what are now the most depleted whales were once those most frequently used.
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van den Hurk, Youri; Sikström, Fanny; Amkreutz, Luc; Bleasdale, Madeleine; Borvon, Aurélia; Ephrem, Brice; et al. (2023). Supplementary material from "The prelude to industrial whaling: identifying the targets of ancient European whaling using Zooarchaeology and collagen mass-peptide fingerprinting". The Royal Society. Collection. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6821419.v1
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AUTHORS (26)
Yv
Youri van den Hurk
FS
Fanny Sikström
LA
Luc Amkreutz
MB
Madeleine Bleasdale
AB
Aurélia Borvon
BE
Brice Ephrem
CF
Carlos Fernández-Rodríguez
HG
Hannah M. B. Gibbs
LJ
Leif Jonsson
AL
Alexander Lehouck
JC
Jose Martínez Cedeira
SM
Stefan Meng
RM
Rui Monge
MM
Marta Moreno
MN
Mariana Nabais
CN
Carlos Nores
JP
José Antonio Pis Millán
IR
Ian Riddler
US
Ulrich Schmölcke
MS
Martin Segschneider