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The role and significance of marine resource use has been the subject of much scholarly discussion in the field of European Neolithic studies. Despite this, the precise nature, magnitude, and geographic extent of post-agricultural prehistoric marine exploitation in Europe remain unclear. The continued accumulation of substantial shell middens in regions such as County Sligo in the northwest of Ireland subsequent to the introduction of agriculture highlights the noteworthy social and economic interest in littoral resources among coastal farming communities.

These shell middens, which are comprised predominantly of oyster remains and can be up to 3 metres thick in places, are exposed along the coast in eroding sections for hundreds of metres. Recent isotopic evidence indicates that Neolithic communities in Ireland subsisted on a predominantly terrestrial diet, raising interesting questions about the deposition of these middens. Specifically, it remains unclear whether the exploitation of the marine environment at this time represents a sporadic, local response to climate change, intermittent crop failure, or a long-term strategy to mitigate environmental constraints in remote Atlantic coastal settings.

Here we present preliminary results from the NeoMarE project (Neolithic Marine Resource Exploitation in Atlantic Europe), which seeks to address these issues through a targeted programme of radiocarbon dating, archaeological soil micromorphology, and lipid biomarker analysis for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. This is coupled with a bottom-up citizen science initiative to help identify and target midden sites that are imminently threatened by coastal erosion.

The results of this project are considered alongside recent studies from other regions of Europe and offer fresh evidence for critically re-evaluating competing hypotheses about Neolithic coastal resource exploitation in Atlantic coastal environments.

EAA 2023: Abstract

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