Fish remains as a source to reconstruct long-term changes of fish communities in the Austrian and Hungarian Danube

Aquat Sci (2015) 77:337–354 DOI 10.1007/s00027-015-0393-8 Aquatic Sciences RESEARCH ARTICLE Fish remains as a source to reconstruct long-term changes of fish communities in the Austrian and Hungarian Danube Alfred Galik • Gertrud Haidvogl • Laszlo Bartosiewicz Gabor Guti • Mathias Jungwirth • Received: 25 February 2014 / Accepted: 11 May 2015 / Published online: 3 June 2015 Ó The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract The main objective of this paper is to investigate how archaeological fish remains and written historical records can contribute to the reconstruction of long-term developments of fish communities along the Austrian and Hungarian Danube. Although such approaches are sensitive to various factors, the chronological subdivision and relative quantification of proxy data demonstrate environmental and faunal changes from Prehistory onwards. Intensification of fisheries, decline of large specimens and massive exploitation of small and young fish point to increasing pressure along the chronological sequence towards Early Modern times. One result of this impact was the establishment of regulations and laws to protect such fish. At the same time, the rise of aquaculture and common carp cultivation can be viewed as another upshot of human impact on the Danube’s environment. Finally, the massive import of salted marine fish reflects a compensation for the undersupply caused by overexploitation of the Danube fish fauna and points to the growing demand for fish as food in late medieval and Early Modern times. Keywords Archaeoichthyology
Archaeological methods
Fish community change
Austrian Danube
Hungarian Danube This article is part of the special issue ‘Historical ecology of riverine fish in Europe’. A. Galik (&) Institute of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Veterinärplatz 1, 1210 Vienna, Austria e-mail: G. Haidvogl
M. Jungwirth Institute of Hydrobiology and Aquatic Ecosystem Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria L. Bartosiewicz Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary L. Bartosiewicz School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Ireland G. Guti Danube Research Institute, MTA Centre for Ecological Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary Introduction The Danube comprises a multitude of aquatic environments along its course from the German Schwarzwald to Austria, Hungary and further south into the Carpathian Basin. Although the river endangered riparian communities by recurring flooding, humans also exploited the natural habitats along the Danube as documented by numerous archaeological sites along the Austrian and the Hungarian part (river km 2135–1886 and 1796–1581). Excavations here uncovered refuse deposits containing fish remains and prove that fishing has substantially contributed to human nutrition since the Neolithic (Bökönyi 1974; Radu 2003; Bartosiewicz 2013). The successful identification of many fish bones to species level is certainly based on the availability of reference collections. The investigations of such archaeological remains as proxy data address many societal and ecological questions. Cultural preferences influence various social levels as comparing monastic and aristocratic households or 123 338 civil sites including latrines and waste disposal places (Galik 1999). Many factors weaken the signals of such proxies, for example their unknown taphonomic history, their inhomogeneity or the precision of recovery. Fish remains from sieved samples significantly differ from handcollected samples, which yield only few but large specimens (Jones 1983; Bartosiewicz 1988; Cao et al. 2002; Gobalet 2005; Zohar and Belmaker 2005; Chao et al. 2009). Therefore, screening of sieved sediment samples is a precondition for the reliable recovery of fish remains, independent of diverse taphonomic potentials of preservation in various contexts. Especially latrines offer extraordinary conditions as cavities in which masses of material were concentrated during short time spans and excellent preservation conditions conserved even fragile and tiny fish bones (Heinrich 1995; Brombacher et al. 1998; Nussbaumer and Rehazek 2007). Ecological approaches usually relate to manmade faunal changes or impacts on ecosystems (Kurlansky 1999; Jackson et al. 2001; Pitcher 2001) and, in the case of fishes, environmental pressure can be illustrated by the size patterns of reconstructed lengths of specific species (Jackson et al. 2001). Nonetheless, information derived from archaeological proxy data cannot be simply transformed into measureable variables. Rather, according to Pauly (1995), they are more like ‘‘anecdotes’’. According to Jackson et al. (2001) ‘‘the precision and clarity of the signal they measure’’ appears to be somewhat unclear but a framework combining historical and archaeoichthyological data as proxies produces stronger signals on a long-term scale. Nevertheless, the finds along the Austrian and Hungarian part of the Danube clearly bear the potential to detect changes chronologically and at a regional scale in a riverine milieu providing new societal and environmental data beyond written documents (Haidvogl et al. 2014). Using such information about past ecological conditions raises a crucial question related to the provenance of the fish. Especially for the later periods, it often remains uncertain if the archaeological fish remains originated from local waters or if they were traded from distant places. For continental sites such as the upper and middle Danube, this is easy to answer only in the case of marine fish. The main objective of this paper is to test the capacity of such remains to contribute to reconstructing past fish ecological conditions. This involves (1) analysing the influence of recovery methods on the resulting species list, (2) investigating whether the relative abundance of fish species differs on large spatial and temporal scales, (3) identifying size distributions and (4) comparing the fish remains from the early modern period with written documents to reveal differences between two distinct types of proxy information. 123 A. Galik et al. Materials and methods Provenance of the archaeological fish remains The archaeoichthyological material comes from sites along the Danube in Austria and Hungary. The Austrian river section is characterized by alpine influences in terms of velocity and temperature. Downstream of Bratislava and Györ the character shifts towards a lowland river, also reflected by a change from a dominance of rheophilic and eurytopic to more limnophilic cyprinids (Schiemer et al. 2004). The Austrian Roman, medieval and post medieval sites are concentrated in the Vienna Basin (Fig. 1: 5–13), which showed—prior to the channelization in the 19th century—the typical pattern of an (...truncated)