Enrico Felici: Thynnos. Archeologia della tonnara Mediterranea
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BOOK REVIEW
Enrico Felici: Thynnos. Archeologia della tonnara Mediterranea Edipuglia, Bari, 2018, 270 pp, 2 appendices, text in Italian, ISBN 978-88-7228-872-6 Dimitra Mylona1 Accepted: 26 October 2020 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Felici’s book Thynnos. Archeologia della tonnara Mediterranea (Tuna. The archaeology of Mediterranean tonnara) is for readers who want to truly understand tuna fishing and processing in the past. It untangles the various aspects of this highly articulated, complex and integrated sector of past fisheries. Felici describes the topic as ‘‘archaeology of the Mediterranean tonnara’’, but the book is much more than that. The author draws data from ancient Greek and Latin literature and epigraphy, from archaeology and art, from mediaeval and early modern written sources and from ethnography to paint a detailed and clear picture of what constituted tuna fishing and processing in pre-modern times with emphasis on Classical and Roman antiquity. A comprehensive work like this was sorely missing. It sets solid foundations for further thematically or regionally focused studies. The role of fishing in ancient economies has recently emerged as a dynamic field of historical and archaeological research (e.g. Mylona 2008; Bekker-Nielsen and BernalCasasola 2010; Marzano 2013; Lytle 2018), while the significance of fish processing and trading in fish products as major factors of wealth generation was recognized several decades ago (Ponsich and Tarradell 1965; Curtis 1991; Botte 2009; Trakadas 2015, 2018; Mylona and Nicholson 2018; Grainger 2021). The exploitation of tuna and related migratory species traverses these two areas of research and frequently appears in the historical and archaeological literature. Tuna is now an endangered species, and the scientific community is in search of viable management plans, looking for insight, among others, into the historical tuna fisheries (e.g. Fromentin 2009; Di Natale 2012). The antiquity of tuna fishing, which is at the heart of this book, could contribute to this endeavour. Felici repeatedly draws our attention to the fact that written evidence, art and archaeological data need to be interpreted rather than taken at face value. He uses a rich body of ethnographic data on tuna fishing in Sicily and in other parts of the Mediterranean to provide a framework of interpretation. Felici represents a rare case of a historian/ & Dimitra Mylona [email protected] 1
Institute for Aegean Prehistory, Study Center for East Crete, Pachia Ammos, Crete, Greece
123
Journal of Maritime Archaeology
archaeologist who fully understands the processes and nuances involved in the exploitation of the migratory fish, tunas and related species, and this aids interpretation and adds value to his meticulous account of the workings of tuna fishing in the ancient Mediterranean. This attention to the validity of the information drawn from ancient sources is valuable and enables more credible reconstructi
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