Anthropogenic effects on oceans including pollution, climate change, habitat destruction, and overfishing are threatening the viability of fish stocks and the health of the ocean. In 2010, the FAO reported 30% of fish stocks were overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion, but it is likely much higher. Creating evidence-based fisheries management policies, critical to long-term ocean health, requires data on the natural variation and responses to environmental and anthropogenic pressures in healthy fish populations. However, as most, if not all, of the living fish populations, are unhealthy this is difficult. Archaeology offers an alternative line of evidence to help overcome this issue by providing detailed, long-range histories of local inshore fisheries and their exploitation by humans. The sheer diversity of species (~30,000) means that conventional zooarchaeological approaches combined with limited reference collections struggle to identify the vast majority of remains below family level with zooachaeologists estimating that only 4-10% of fish bones are identified to species. Such low-resolution information prevents archaeology from usefully contributing to studies of past fishing, let alone contributing to current management issues. MAFRI explored the possibilities of employing of ZooMS, recently described as a ‘Game Changing Technique’ using archaeological material to directly address ecological questions. The hope is that ZooMS can greatly improve this resolution and help identify diversity within the earliest fish populations exploited by humans and thus how much this has been impacted by fishing pressures. This can include tracking invasive species in the past, such as carp and exploring past population distributions to predict how fish populations might be affected by warmer waters caused by climate change.
