Marine historical ecology of groupers (Epinephelidae) in the eastern Mediterranean utilising zooarchaeology, dietary isotopes, collagen sequencing, and peptide mass fingerprinting

Abstract

Marine resources have been exploited in the eastern Mediterranean for millennia, forming an important dietary resource for many coastal settlements. Being highly organoleptic fishes, groupers represent one of the most ubiquitous ichthyofaunal finds since the Neolithic in eastern Mediterranean archeological contexts. Groupers (Epinephelidae) are large, solitary, apex predatory fishes found globally in coastal rocky reef ecosystems in temperate, subtropical, and tropical marine waters. Due to various life history traits such as slow time to maturity, sequential hermaphroditism, and the formation of spawning aggregations, groupers are particularly vulnerable to the effects of overfishing. They have been heavily fished in the eastern Mediterranean leading to several species being classified as 'vulnerable' and 'endangered' by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Abundant, large predators, such as groupers, are essential for maintaining healthy ecosystems. Their high frequency in Mediterranean archaeological contexts and importance to marine ecosystems makes them key taxa for gaining long term perspectives on local fishing in the eastern Mediterranean and for establishing historical baselines.This work employs three methods to gain long term perspectives on grouper fisheries as well as to establish historical ecological baselines for Mediterranean groupers in the Levant (Chapter 2). The material analysed for this thesis comprises fish bones from three eastern Mediterranean coastal archaeological sites. The bulk of material studied comes from Kinet Höyük (ca. 3000 -50 BC and 8/9 th c. -14 th c. AD), located in the most northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea in Iskenderun Bay, Turkey with additional material coming from two coastal sites located in present day Lebanon, Tell el-Burak (975 -334 BC) and Tell Fadous-Kfarabida (ca. 3000 -1550 BC). Osteometrics were used to analyse grouper and comber (fishes with similar ecology to groupers which are osteomorphologically indistinguishable from groupers) bones from all three sites to reconstruct catch sizes in the past and assess for fluctuations in the size structure of past grouper populations. Stable isotopes analysis, ẟ 13 C and ẟ 15 N, of archaeological fish bones was undertaken to reconstruct the foraging ecology of ancient marine ichthyofauna in the eastern Mediterranean with a special emphasis on groupers. Lastly,