September 17, 2015 — Our relationship with cod hasn’t always been plain sailing, and a new project led by a researcher at Trinity College Dublin wants to bring that history into focus.
Prof Poul Holm has secured a prestigious €2.5 million grant from the European Research Council to build a database of information, ranging from the DNA of fish remains excavated from human settlements to the details of ship and monastic logs and even restaurant menus. Why? To figure out how cod fisheries shaped human diets and practices in centuries past.
As a co-founder of the international Census of Marine Life’s History of Marine Animals Project (now the Oceans Past Initiative), Holm is no stranger to combining marine history and science, and he draws on an eclectic mix of data sources. “Anything that will tell us about what used to live in the sea is of interest,” he says.
Data sources include findings from archaeological excavations about what fish people ate. “[You can] dig into kitchen middens or the waste dumps and simply identify what types of fish are there, how many, what would be the calorific value and how it was cooked,” says Holm, who is professor of environmental history at Trinity. “And now we have DNA analysis too, which can tell us where that fish originally came from.”