< home # store # services # articles # game # app #contact >

Most marine fish remains from the Levant’s early neolithic or pre-pottery period are shallow-water, lagoonal or brackish species
Not large open-ocean fish like tuna.

The larger tuna bones, where found though. They appear mainly in the archaeological record outside the Levant, such as in the Aegean region
Some mesolithic and early neolithic sites contain fragments of tuna vertebrae. It could have been opportunistic.

Particularly in Phoenician and Classical periods. Tuna fishing and processing became economically important
They needed stronger nets, and boats capable of offshore fishing.

Check out big tuna with some more neolithic architecture today.

Bibliography: Adam J Andrews, Antonio Di Natale, Darío Bernal-Casasola, Veronica Aniceti, Vedat Onar, Tarek Oueslati, Tatiana Theodropoulou, Arturo Morales-Muñiz, Elisabetta Cilli, Fausto Tinti, Exploitation history of Atlantic bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean—insights from ancient bones, ICES Journal of Marine Science, Volume 79, Issue 2, March 2022, Pages 247–262, https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsab261

Dietary reconstruction and near eastern archaeology. (n.d.). Expedition Magazine. https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/dietary-reconstruction-and-near-eastern-archaeology/
Calar Tonnara: Ethnographic-based artistic narratives around tuna fishing in the Mediterranean | Stanford Humanities Center. (n.d.). https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/calar-tonnara-ethnographic-based-artistic-narratives-around-tuna-fishing