A Pontic Fishy Business or How to Map the Halieutic Activities in the Black Sea Area

The authors propose the presentation of some preliminary results obtained in the research project Halieutica Scythiae Minoris: Fishing and Fish Industry at the Mouth of the Danube in Roman and Early Byzantine Times. We attempted to develop an interdisciplinary research model for Pontic fishery resources, which involves both traditional investigations and the integration of the achieved results into digital media. The integration into GIS of data related to ichthyofauna as identified in various ancient writers was performed by creating separate spatial data sets for each species, namely: native range distribution, the presence/absence in the Pontic basin of each species selected according to archaeological evidence, as well as the presence/absence of these types in the Schitya Minor fishing area. We overlapped the representation of fish resources with the maps concerning the processing centres, occupations or fishing and commercial professional associations, as well as with the destinations of exported products, according to ancient sources.


The Material Digital Humanities seminar is co-hosted by the Digital Humanities Research Hub, University of London, UK, and Star-UBB Institute of Advanced Studies, University Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj Napoca, Romania.