The fish fauna of early-medieval layers of the Vegetable Market excavation site in Szczecin, Poland

Abstract

Background. The more than 10-metre deep archaeological site called the Vegetable Market (Kraut Markt), located near the Pomeranian Dukes’ Castle in Szczecin, was explored in 1953-1964. The site was found to contain 20 early-medieval sediment layers and a layer overlying the basement consisting of riverine mud. Historically, the layers spanned a period from the second decade of the 10th to the beginning of the 5th decade of the 13th century. Materials and methods. The dig yielded numerous cultural artefacts, including fish remains examined during this study. The present paper summarises continuation of research on fish bone remains. The research allowed to identify a total of 10 085 bones in 725 labelled collections. The identified bones of 20 fish species were compared with bones of the extant known fish species, belonging to individuals of various size. The analysis made it possible to estimate the lowest abundance and weight of the fish present at the archaeological site examined. Results. The assemblage of 20 species, the remains of which were present in sediment of the site, turned out to be dominated, in terms of abundance, by carp bream (26.4%), followed by zander (17.5%), roach (15.9%), tench (9.5%), wels catfish (9.6%), northern pike (6.3%), European perch (6.0%), sturgeon (3.1%), and asp (2.2%), the total fish weight being dominated by sturgeon (31.3%), followed by wels catfish (27.0%), zander (15.3%), carp bream (10.6%), northern pike (5.1%), tench (4.2%), roach (2.2%), asp (2.1%), and European perch (1.1%). The remaining 11 species (twaite shad, European chub, ide, rudd, zope, white bream, Baltic vimba, ziege, crucian carp, European eel, and ruffe) contributed much less both to the abundance and to the weight.

Keywords

• archaeological excavations
• early Middle Ages
• fis