Overexploitation has directly, negatively affected marine fish populations in the past half-century, modifying not only their abundance but their behaviour and life-history traits. The recovery and resilience of such populations is dependent upon their exploitation history, which often extends back millennia. Hence, data on when exploitation intensified and how populations were composed in historical periods, have the potential to reveal long-term population dynamics and provide context on the baselines currently used in fisheries management and conservation. Here, we setup a framework for investigations on the exploitation history of Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus; BFT) in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean by collating records of their zooarchaeological remains and critically reviewing these alongside the literature. Then, we outline how novel multidisciplinary applications on BFT remains may be used to document long-term population dynamics. Our review of literature provides clear evidence of BFT overexploitation during the mid-20th century ce. Furthermore, a strong case could be made that the intensification of BFT exploitation extends back further to at least the 19th century ce, if not the 13th–16th century ce, in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean. However, a host of archaeological evidence would suggest that BFT exploitation may have been intensive since antiquity. Altogether, this indicates that by the currently used management baselines of the 1970s,  population abundance and complexity was already likely to have declined from historical levels, and we identify how biomolecular and morphometric analyses of BFT remains have the potential to further investigate this.

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Recent excavations in Northern France shed light on new trends in fishing between the 9th and 11th centuries AD. This paper presents the data from two sites characterized by the fishing of large gadids. These finds are contextualized within the broader synchronic regional context and the diachronic local context from the pre‐Roman period to medieval times. From this analysis, it becomes apparent that the sites from Saint‐Georges‐sur‐l'Aa and the neighbouring site of Craywick present innovative fishing tackle and capture grounds along a new type of architecture of the buildings. The skeletal profiles of fish but also of cattle show that the excavated areas were activity zones where butchering was taking place rather than consumption. Some unusual finds such as chopped and burnt fin whale bones and also the manufacture of an object from a rib of whale underline the innovative character of the site. The period around the 10th century seems to be a turning point in the evolution of the occupation of the southern shore of the Channel and hints towards similar changes taking place in Great Britain within the scope of the so‐called fish event horizon.

The distribution of the black rat (Rattus rattus) has been heavily influenced by its association with humans. The dispersal history of this non-native commensal rodent across Europe, however, remains poorly understood, and different introductions may have occurred during the Roman and medieval periods. Here, in order to reconstruct the population history of European black rats, we first generate a de novo genome assembly of the black rat. We then sequence 67 ancient and three modern black rat mitogenomes, and 36 ancient and three modern nuclear genomes from archaeological sites spanning the 1st-17th centuries CE in Europe and North Africa. Analyses of our newly reported sequences, together with published mitochondrial DNA sequences, confirm that black rats were introduced into the Mediterranean and Europe from Southwest Asia. Genomic analyses of the ancient rats reveal a population turnover in temperate Europe between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, coincident with an archaeologically attested decline in the black rat population. The near disappearance and re-emergence of black rats in Europe may have been the result of the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the First Plague Pandemic, and/or post-Roman climatic cooling.

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