Good reference collections are essential to support study of fish remains and to improve understanding of long-term changes to fish ecology and fishing practices. Reference collections present particular challenges in countries that have high fish biodiversity and limited research infrastructure and where the costs of obtaining, preparing and curating numerous fish skeletons in ways useful for research (Wheeler and Jones 1989, 177-88) can be prohibitive. Archaeological Fish-Bone Images (AFBI), developed in collaboration with the University of Sydney Library, is a new online sustainably archived digital fish bone reference collection designed to overcome these problems. This article explains the background to recent research on Aboriginal and colonial-period fishing in the Sydney region, New South Wales, Australia (Colley in prep.), for which the AFBI archive was originally created. The archive contains over 500 high-quality digital images of modern and archaeological fish remains and associated metadata. It also makes accessible additional archaeological, historical and ecological data about fishes considered especially relevant to Aboriginal people and colonial settlers who lived in the Sydney region between 3000 years ago to the late 19th century (Table 1). The archive also provides details of taxonomic and anatomical nomenclature (Tables 2 and 3) and information about fishing and fisheries interpreted from an important late 19th-century government report (Table 4). The AFBI archive is valuable to users in Sydney and elsewhere who need to identify fish remains of the same or similar taxa. The archive offers many advantages over physical reference collections and has significant potential for future expansion and improved functionality.
© Internet Archaeology/Author(s)
University of York legal statements | Terms and Conditions
| File last updated: Tue Nov 2 2010