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The 'R' is in the month! This week, although thinking about #turkeys, I ended up buying #Zeeuwsemosselen --of course! by mere coincidence, tonite we had @jon_erlandson (Thnx @ErcTradition for the invite!) and mussels for dinner. So a thread down the memory lane: 1/
Excavating at the ancient seaport of Kinet Höyük (Hittite Izziya) on the northern Levantine coast as a BA student.
The site was a hotspot of biodiversity! There was never a dull day. e.g. Thick deposits of crushed murex shells! (7th century BC)...
(more info here: https://books.google.nl/books?id=FOW9DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)
and a whole lot more!
(more info here: https://books.google.nl/books?id=FOW9DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)
and a whole lot more!
Then grad school took me away from Kinet to #Tuebingen & to land at Troy (where @AmsTroyProject et al. work these days). Troy/Troia was a #shellmidden compared to anything I'd ever seen in the Levant! A shot from a #BronzeAge deposit:
These ones: Some were burnt. More than enough photos of them in my phd dissertation (just as prehistoric as these cockles) @BAR_Publishing
But how did the Trojans ate so many of them? Where, how, when did they collect them and what happened to the cockle populations throughout millennia of harvesting? My first @WennerGrenOrg was granted to build a modern mollusk collection to understand Trojan cockle gathering.
First I collected the wrong species (yes, I did). This is Acanthocardia tuberculata, which buries itself much deeper, lives in fully marine water, much more difficult to collect, gorgeous animal.
Our cockles lived here:
We went there summer and winter to take samples... I could have never done it by myself if it were for the famous Engin Abi of @troyamuzesi. He would think of bringing lunch, not me! @Canankaratas19
Nobody, not even scientists were monitoring these cockles at the time. The last folks who harvested them were the Greek villagers Schliemann & Blegen (excavators of Troy) worked with in the late 19th century /early 20th century. Once we found the beds, it was easy to get lunch.
Compared to all #archaeological cockles, the modern ones were huge (cohorts collected randomly, throughout the year). In the 3rd millennium BC, Trojans would sit around the hearth in their megara and eat cockles sizzling in fire. They loved them like Turks love sunflower seeds.
Middle Bronze Age in Troy did not yield very many shells (or very many other bioarchaeological remains at all)...In the Late Bronze Age, when Trojans turned their attention to what they considered more important to survive, they ate less but larger cockles.
Isotopic analysis of incremental shell layers showed that cockle growth was complicated and dynamic. I found an old email to a scientist at @BangorUni 'they don't make sense! s.o.s.' Turned out they did, if you counted over 4000 of them!
Size -increments-seasons correlated. Like @jon_erlandson 's mussels, there was no gradual reduction in individual size or population size throughout time. When exploitation pressure was released, cockles enjoyed a longer lives.
(details: Archaeofauna or
https://www.barpublishing.com/mollusk-shells-in-troia-yenibademli-and-ulucak.html
(details: Archaeofauna or
https://www.barpublishing.com/mollusk-shells-in-troia-yenibademli-and-ulucak.html
