From Hakai Magazine, December 13:
Archaeologist Dimitra Mylona’s odyssey to reveal the Mediterranean Sea’s lost bounty.
On the eastern end of the Greek island of Crete, archaeologist Dimitra Mylona steps out onto the dun-colored remains of the 3,500-year-old Minoan settlement of Palaikastro and considers the past. Not just the big-P past that is the fundament of her career but also the small-p past of her own route to truth through a discipline burdened by myth and speculation. For the past 30 years, Mylona has been testing and refining her methodology, sifting through sites to ever-finer degrees. And if there’s anything the past few decades have taught her, it’s that the closer you look at ancient Mediterranean civilizations, the more the fish rise to the surface.
Mylona is a zooarchaeologist—a specialist in the study of animal remains of ancient societies. Through the close observation of bones, shells, and other finds, zooarchaeologists try to re-create a picture of the way humans hunted, husbanded, ate, and more generally interacted with the animals around them. Traditionally, zooarchaeologists in the Mediterranean have focused on goat and sheep and other forms of terrestrial protein as the go-to meat sources for Greece and other Mediterranean countries. Back in 1991, as a new graduate student, Mylona thought no differently, imagining herself picking through the remains of livestock. But during one of her first digs, in the same Palaikastro she now surveys, the presence of an entirely different find captivated her—fish bones.
Working by the sea, Mylona and other students were excavating the dirt floors of Minoan houses more than 3,000 years old. To retrieve minuscule finds—carbonized seeds of plants, bits of wood charcoal, bones of birds, lizards, and fish—they sifted the soil by using water to float the smallest of objects to visibility. “One of the senior archaeologists called me over to look into the microscope,” she says. “I imagine she was hoping to find someone that would take an interest in something others had ignored.” In the scope was one of the many tiny fish bones that were found that day, probably belonging to a small comber or a wrasse. The senior archaeologist was right. Mylona gazed at the folds and crenulations of those fish vertebrae and mused: a story lurked. She learned during those early digs that archaeologists in Greece were just beginning to employ the much more fine-scale water flotation method to the soils of ancient sites, and as a result more and more fish remains were coming to light. The search for a fishier ancient world, Mylona thought, might be the way forward for her academic career....*****....Setting out to the University of Sheffield in England in the early 1990s for graduate work, Mylona immediately felt resistance to her newfound focus. Her graduate supervisor advised her against committing to a fish bone master’s degree, instead urging her to specialize in the analysis of mammal bones. Fish bones were a dead end, he maintained....
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