Fish and salt: The successful recipe of White Nile Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fishers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2018.02.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The earliest use of salt for fish conservation is here proved in the Nile valley.

  • Mineralogical and chemical analysis indicate the use of halite.

  • This food conservation practice favoured sedentism in hunter-gatherer-fisher society.

Abstract

In prehistoric hunter-gatherer-fisher communities, demographic growth and a more sedentary life-style are usually associated with locally concentrated food resources. Technologies believed to have been employed for preserving excess food resources include, among many others, salting, smoking, and/or sun-drying of fish and meat. However, direct proof of salting is often lacking, as salt is highly soluble. We present here the first robust evidence of the earliest known examples of fish salting from Middle Mesolithic structures at an archaeological site in Central Sudan (7th millennium BC). A multidisciplinary approach was applied, including a contextual geoarchaeological study (field analysis; micromorphological and scanning electron microscopy), a mineralogical-microstructural analysis of salt crystallization (X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy), and a chemical analysis of salt concentration (ionic chromatography) in the soil in which salted fish bones have been found. The results indicate that salting fish with the aim of preserving it was common at the site of Al Khiday since the Middle Mesolithic and this habit cannot be related to post-depositional precipitation due to aridification of the area. A clear-cut emphasis on fishing characterized the economy of the human population of the time. This foraging system, together with salting and storing fish seems to be closely connected with its nearly sedentary status.

Introduction

Practices which enhance the possibility of storing food against future periods of shortage, to preserve it in the case of overproduction, and to transport it to other residential locations, are thought to have reduced the need for residential mobility (Binford, 1980, Testart, 1982, Yesner, 1980, Zeder, 2012). Most of the theoretical analyses of settlement patterns, demography and economy, including food storage and delayed-return strategies in prehistoric societies, are based on ethnographic analogies (Bettinger, 2001, Finlayson, 2009, Kuijt, 2008, Testart, 1982). However, when dealing with the variability and specific constraints of archaeological data (Rowley-Conwy, 2001) this approach may lead to misleading oversimplifications. Direct proof of food conservation, especially fish, based on archaeological evidence and supported by scientific analyses, is scarce. Technologies adopted by ancient communities intensively exploiting marine, lacustrine or riverine aquatic resources, have thus been hypothesized by deductive reasoning (Sordoillet et al., 2018, Bar-Yosef Mayer, 2013, Cannon and Yang, 2006, Deith, 1989, Glykou, 2014, Mylona, 2010, Sakaguchi, 2009, Van Neer, 2004, Van Neer et al., 2005, Vermeersch et al., 2000, Zohar and Cooke, 1997, Zohar et al., 2001).

The oldest evidence of smoking fish dates back to the late Palaeolithic (13000-12000 BC) of Makhadma 2 and 4 in Egypt (Van Neer, 1994, Van Neer et al., 2000), and the oldest indications of possible fish fermentation come from Norje Sunnansund, an early Mesolithic site (ca. 7000 BC) on the south-eastern coast of Sweden (Boethius, 2016). Archaeozoological studies indicate early intensive fish curing, salting and/or smoking at Mesolithic sites in the eastern Mediterranean islands from Sicily to Cyprus, and the coastal Levant (8th-7th millennium BC) (Cassoli and Tagliacozzo, 1995, Mylona, 2014, Zohar et al., 2001). As elsewhere, fish processing for storage in the Mesolithic of central Sudan has been hypothesised earlier, according to indirect evidence (Peters, 1995).

We present here mineralogical, geochemical and archaeological data on fish remains attesting to the oldest use of salt for fish conservation by an early Holocene hunter-gatherer-fisher community along the White Nile River in the Sudan. At the Al Khiday Mesolithic sites (∼7000–6000 BC) in central Sudan, there was a large emphasis on fishing since the Early Mesolithic (∼7000–6750 BC), as attested by the large quantities of fish remains (Salvatori et al., 2014, Williams et al., 2015, Linseele and Zerboni, in press; about 90% of more than 15000 bones studied so far). The predominant taxon is clariid catfish (Clariidae) (according to the context, about 50–80% of the total number of identified fish bones). Size reconstructions show that most individuals had Standard Lengths (length from the tip of the snout to the beginning of the tail) of 40–60 cm and more. This indicates that people were probably mainly fishing at the beginning of the flood season, when these fish must have been easy to catch in shallow waters (Van Neer, 2004).

The archaeological record also contains harpoons (Fig. 1) as part of the fishing gear, although most equipment was probably made of perishable materials (e.g., nets and baskets). This fishing-based economy is linked to the geographic location of sites on the western bank of the White Nile, on the edge of a wetland area (Williams et al., 2015, Zerboni, 2011). The salt (halite, NaCl) on fish bones of some pits in site 16-D-4B (∼6440–6250 BC) at Al Khiday (Fig. 1), discovered during stable isotope studies on human and animal bones for dietary and environmental reconstructions (Iacumin et al., 2016), was investigated to define the occurrence, nature and origin of this mineral phase. The data confirm the world's oldest evidence of fish salting, add new information on food storage in prehistoric societies with access to rich natural resources and, more in general, highlight some archaeological and anthropological implications concerning the lifestyle of Early Holocene human groups along the Nile Valley.

Section snippets

Al Khiday Mesolithic sites

The central Sudan Mesolithic, also known as Khartoum Mesolithic, as defined by Anthony J. Arkell, 1947, Arkell, 1949, is one of the several communities of pottery bearing hunter-gatherer-fishers living in the Early Holocene (Budja, 2006, Cohen, 2013, Eerkens and Lipo, 2014, Jordan and Zvelebil, 2009, Piezonka, 2012, Speth, 2010, Wang et al., 2015). During the last sixty years, several Khartoum Mesolithic sites have been discovered and partially excavated in central Sudan (Ali Hakem and Khabir,

Geological and geomorphological background

The archaeological sites of Al Khiday are located along the western bank of the White Nile (Fig. 6), between the Jebel Aulia dam and Khartoum-Omdurman conurbation, within coordinates Latitude 15°15′–15°35′ N, Longitude 32°22′–32°28' (Salvatori et al., 2011, Salvatori et al., 2014, Usai, 2014, Zerboni, 2011). The Mesolithic archaeological sites of Al Khiday are distributed along the junction between the western pediment surface and a few meter-stepped terraces, cut by the White Nile in the Late

Materials and methods

This study focused mainly on the animal remains found in pits in waste disposal area 16-D-4B (Table S1), since halite was not detected in other archaeological materials or sediments from the Al Khiday sites (Dal Sasso et al., 2014a, Dal Sasso et al., 2014b, Zerboni, 2011, Iacumin et al., 2016, Buckley et al., 2014). Faunal remains at Al Khiday were collected on site by dry sieving of archaeological sediments through 2-mm mesh screens. The fish bones are well preserved and no anthropogenic

Chronological framework

As stated above, new archaeological work focusing on the Early Holocene exploitation of the region south of Khartoum allowed us to produce the first cultural sequence of the Khartoum Mesolithic, covering nearly two millennia. On the basis of archaeological materials and radiocarbon dating, this cultural period may be divided into three phases, Early, Middle and Late Mesolithic. Radiocarbon dating results are shown in a Bayesian model (Fig. 2). The overall agreement index is 114.5%, well above

Discussion: evidence for fish-salting in the Nile valley

Salting is a traditional post-harvest treatment of fish, used in many countries worldwide to remove water and lower microbial activity, thus preventing bacterial proliferation (Wheaton and Lawson, 1985, FAO, 1992). In Sudan, the practice of salting fish has been archaeologically attested since the Napatean period at Kerma (first half of the 1st millennium BC) (Salah, 1997). In addition, again in Sudan, fish is traditionally preserved salted, sun-dried, fermented or smoked (Ahmed et al., 2010,

Conclusions

The earliest archaeological evidence of salt use for food conservation (from mining to evaporation of salty water) dates to the Neolithic in Europe (Weller, 2015) and to the 6th - 5th millennium BC in the Near East (Marro and Michel, 2013). However, this evidence consists mainly of mining tools and a specific pottery type, the briquette, a fired-clay mould used in the extraction of salt from brines by evaporation (Weller, 2015). In both cases, nothing proves that the salt had been used for

Acknowledgments

We thank the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, Khartoum (Sudan), in particular the General Director Abdelrahman Ali Mohamed, for authorising the export and study of the archaeological materials. The Ministero degli Affari Esteri (MAE) of the Italian Government and Centro Studi Sudanesi e Sub-Sahariani (CSSeS) funded the archaeological research (funding to D.U.). Additional funding for analyses came from Università degli Studi di Milano (Fondi Speciali per le Ricerche

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