The North Atlantic cod trade: A meta-analysis of the North American and European archaeological records

Abstract

Although the trans-Atlantic cod trade linked North American and European socioeconomic spheres, few studies analyze both regions concurrently to understand the impact and extent of cod trade at a wider scale. We summarize new results of zooarchaeological analysis from Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, Canada, a major North American cod-trading port, and consider its role in the wider trans-Atlantic trade network by conducting a meta-analysis of the archaeological record of cod trade during the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. We show that though cod remains are abundant in assemblages from the Northeast and Atlantic Canada where they were caught and processed, they are relatively rare in other North American assemblages, including Caribbean plantations where cod was imported in large quantities to support slave laborers. Furthermore, though North Atlantic cod have been identified isotopically in European assemblages, they are found primarily within the known habitat range of Atlantic cod at this time. Finally, by comparing European and North American datasets we demonstrate that length is unlikely to be reliable as a means of sourcing cod. This examination contributes to our understanding of cod’s important economic role in the development of trans-Atlantic connections between North American and European trading ports.

Keywords:

• Gadidae
• colonial economics
• zooarchaeology
• exchange networks
• bacalao

Supplemental Material

Supplementary Table 1. Summary of North American Datasets Examined in Meta-Analysis.

Supplementary Table 2. Summary of European Datasets Examined in Meta-Analysis.

Supplementary Table 3. Number of Identified Fish Families per North American Dataset (refer to Table S1).

Supplementary Table 4. Number of Identified Fish Families per European Dataset (refer to Table S2).

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Heidi Moses and Rebecca Dunham for arranging access to the King’s Bastion Barracks faunal material, and to Randy Lauff and the St Francis Xavier Biology Department for the use of the Zoology Collections. We must also acknowledge and thank Dr Matthew Betts and his colleagues and Franka Kerklaan for sharing their data with us. Finally, we thank Dr Elizabeth Reitz and two unnamed reviewers for their helpful reviews of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to report.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Hill Fellowship awarded by the Department of Anthropology at Penn State.